Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil

This is the title and The SCCRC Statement of Reasons in Relation to the MEBO Timer Fragment is the sub-title of a long and detailed analysis and critique of the findings of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in relation to the infamous label productions PT35(a) to (d) published yesterday by Baz on his blog The Masonic Verses. It could be read here earlier this morning, but for some reason the piece seems now to have disappeared from the website. 

The article is once again available on Baz's website.

The primary suitcase and its contents

The Primary Suitcase and Its Contents - Rethinking Basic Assumptions is the title of an article published yesterday on baz’s blog The Masonic Verses, prompted by the recent Aljazeera documentary Lockerbie: what really happened?  As with all of baz’s Lockerbie writings, it deserves careful study.

English barrister demolishes Crown's Lockerbie Megrahi evidence

The indefatigable David Wolchover, barrister and Head of Chambers Emeritus at 7 Bell Yard, has recently returned to the charge over Lockerbie and the Megrahi conviction in three articles in the Criminal Law & Justice Weekly.  Synopses of the articles can be found here and here and here. 

Mr Wolchover has also produced a magnificent 26,000 word, 24-page, monograph entitled Culprits of Lockerbie: Gaddafi or the Extemists of Palestine in which he dissects the evidence led at Zeist against Megrahi and Libya and explores (a) the evidence for Heathrow (rather than Malta-Frankfurt) insertion of the bomb suitcase and (b) the evidence pointing towards PFLP-GC responsibility. The monograph can be read here. It has now been revised and expanded (see especially pages 6 and 7) to take account of comments by baz on this blog.

Previous Lockerbie articles by David Wolchover are referred to on this blog here.

Recruitment of the FBI's Lockerbie "golden informant"

[What follows is taken from an article headed Richard Marquise and his "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka - An Extract from "Enemies - A History of the FBI" by Tim Weiner posted yesterday on baz’s blog The Masonic Verses:]

Tim Weiner's recent book Enemies - A History of the FBI is a fascinating story of the creation of the FBI within the US Justice Department following American entry into the Great War, not for the purpose of criminal investigation but to counter the threat of radicals, anarchists and communists by means of dubious constitutionality. (...)

The author devotes six pages to an uncritical account of the Bureau's involvement in the Lockerbie case focusing on the role of the leader of the FBI taskforce (of 7 persons) Richard Marquise. (Tom Thurman is not mentioned.)

Marquise was recently quoted in the Dutch media in a story titled "The Lessons of Lockerbie" in relation to the shooting down of flight MH17 over the Ukraine. Marquise advocated the recruitment of a "Golden Informant" to solve the case just as he had done in the Lockerbie case (and by ignoring the actual evidence). Weiner's book gives a very interesting summary of how this "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka was recruited (page 372).

"Marquise needed to turn intelligence into evidence.  He needed a witness who would link Megrahi to the Samsonite suitcase with the Semtex.  He needed to find someone who knew that the suitcase carried the bomb from Air Malta to Pan Am 103.  He went back to the CIA. The Agency told him, belatedly, that it had once had a Libyan informant named Abdul Majid Giaka. He had gone on the CIA's payroll four months before Lockerbie. He was on it the night Pan Am 103 was bombed. But the Agency had dropped him a few months later, deeming him a fabricator milking his interrogators for money.

Marquise was dying to talk to Majid, no matter how dubious he seemed to the CIA.  In June 1991 the Agency flew him from a navy ship off the coast of Malta to give the FBI the chance to interview him in Virginia.  Justly wary of its informant, the CIA imposed one condition: don't tell anybody."  (Marquise immediately phoned Stuart Henderson.)  

"Majid was debriefed for at least two weeks during September 1991. He insisted that he knew three facts. He identified Megrahi as an intelligence officer serving as Libya's airline security chief. He said that Megrahi's subordinate in Malta had a cache of Semtex. And he said he had seen Megrahi with a large brown suitcase at the airport in Malta during the weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. Majid was without doubt an unreliable witness. But the FBI had faith that he was telling the truth on those three points. Marquise thought he had the foundation of a case that would stand up in court."

Giaka's account did stand up unchallenged before a patriotic US Grand Jury leading to the November 1991 indictment. However, it crumbled before even the Mickey Mouse Camp Zeist tribunal when in the defence team's finest hour they had admitted in evidence a large number of CIA cables regarding Giaka. What is astonishing is that Megrahi was actually convicted despite Giaka being discredited, a fact not mentioned in Mr Weiner's book.

Perhaps some of the parties to the MH17 atrocity will, (or have already) recruited their own "Golden Informant".

Marquise's wrote his own account of the Lockerbie investigation in his book Scotbom.  (Which I have never read.) Giaka of course never wrote his memoirs and has never been heard of since the close of the Camp Zeist trial.

I am afraid the only "Lesson of Lockerbie" for the families of those murdered on flight MH17 is how Governments fabricate evidence to suit their own political objectives regardless of the facts.

New Lockerbie blog

A warm welcome is extended to a new blog entitled The Masonic Verses - Lockerbie and Related Scams. Its first post was on 14 November 2008 and takes the form of a critique of the evidence relating to insertion on Pan Am 103 of the suitcase containing the bomb, concluding that it was inserted at Heathrow and was not an interline bag from Malta via Frankfurt. Baz, the blog administrator, informs me that he will be doing one post a week.

Lockerbie - Criminal Justice or "War by Other Means"

This is the title of the most recent post by Baz on The Masonic Verses blog. It provides a fascinating account of the geo-political background to the selection of Libya as fall-guy for the Lockerbie atrocity. The full text can be read here.

Megrahi's freakish conviction just the icing on the cake

[What follows is an item posted yesterday on baz’s blog The Masonic Verses:]

1. There has been considerable and on-going controversy concerning the collapse of the trial of Mr John Downey who was suspected of involvement in the 1982 Hyde Park bombings.   The Judge brought proceedings to a halt when Mr Downey's solicitor Gareth Peirce produced a letter of reassurance issued by the Northern Ireland Police Service informing him that the police did not propose to proceed against him for any crime.

2.    This letter was one of 183 letters known as "On the Run" letters issued to suspected IRA members (it is not known if they were also issued to INLA members)  who were described as being "On the Run" (apparently a polite euphemism for being resident in the Irish Republic - indeed how do you correspond with somebody "on the run" unless of course through an accommodation address).   A speaker on BBC4's Law in Action programme described these as "disguised amnesty" letters.

3.     The letters arose from a perceived anomaly in the Good Friday agreement in which convicted terrorists on both sides of the sectarian divide had been released.  Had these persons described as "On the Run" been convicted they too would have been released. While the Blair Government was unable to carry a general amnesty bill through parliament the "On the Run" letters were used instead.

4.    In setting up a judicial inquiry Prime Minister Cameron described Mr Downey's letter as "a mistake" and declared the object of the inquiry is to ascertain if there were any similar "mistakes".  Apparently the Northern Ireland Police Service were unaware that the Metropolitan Police had applied for a warrant for Mr Downey's arrest!   However as should be blindingly obvious these letters served two purposes.  If an applicant received such a letter he would be in the clear.   However if the applicant did not receive a letter then he or she would be forewarned that it would be unsafe to travel to the UK or a jurisdiction from which they could be extradited.  Perhaps this was the intention.

5.   Mr Downey was arrested at Gatwick apparently while transferring to another plane.  It emerged he had previously travelled to Canada and had made several trips to Ulster.

6. This blog is not about "The Troubles" but primarily the Lockerbie bombing. It is the author's view that the "Libyan solution" to Lockerbie did not arise from real evidence but that evidence was created to implicate the two Libyan suspects (notably the claim the primary suitcase was introduced at Malta not Heathrow and the faking of key exhibits.)  The motivation of the British Government in general and MI5 in particular arose from the Libyans having supplied prodigious quantities of weaponry to the PIRA, a discovery only made from the interception of the Eksund.

7.    The "On the Run" letters demonstrates the quite remarkable lengths the British Government went to in order to make and sustain the Good Friday agreement.   In comments made to Radio 4's World at One former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain staunchly defended the letters and the policies of the Blair Government arguing that the rule of law did not apply in the Northern Ireland situation as it did in England, Scotland and Wales.   He also alluded to (without going into specifics) extraordinary measures taken by previous British Prime Ministers.  While the Lockerbie indictment supposedly came about as a result of a criminal investigation and a judicial process the involvement of the security services, MI5 and the CIA is almost entirely outside the public domain.  The indictment was the pretext for imposing UN sanctions on Libya, which was in the author's view the primary purpose of the indictment.  Mr Megrahi's eventual (and freakish) conviction was just the icing on the cake.

8.   (An earlier post on this blog The (not so) Secret Rulers of the World (Aug 2009)  notes the curious affair of former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson's trip to Syria in December 2000 during the recess of the Camp Zeist trial.)  

David Wolchover responds to a challenge

Barrister David Wolchover has returned to the Lockerbie case in a further article in the Criminal Law & Justice Weekly. It is a response to criticisms on this blog by Baz of one of his earlier articles. Unfortunately, access to Mr Wolchover's latest piece requires subscription to the magazine.  However, I shall provide further details once the full text becomes available and I have returned to South Africa from Namibia.

[Posted from an internet cafē in Lűderitz.]


I am grateful to David Wolchover for sending me a copy of the text of his article Lockerbie: The True Culprits - A Postscript on Proof. It can be read here.

Review of Morag Kerr's "splendid new book"

Baz, the author of The Masonic Verses blog (and a frequent commentator on this blog) has written a long review of Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. The whole review merits close study.  What follows is the first six paragraphs:]

1.      Chapter 1 of Doctor Morag Kerr's splendid new book on the Lockerbie disaster Adequately Explained by Stupidity? is titled  "A Case About Cases".   True enough but it is essentially a Tale of Two Cases, to be precise two identical brown (or "antique bronze")  hard-sided Samsonite suitcases one of which contained the Improvised Explosive Device that destroyed flight PA103 over Scotland on the evening of the 21st December 1989 twenty-five years ago.

2.      One of these suitcases was very real.  The second did not exist at all outside the collective imaginations of the Police investigators notably Chief Superintendent John Orr, relevant lawyers at the Crown Office, perhaps even amongst members of the defence team and the three (or four) trial judges at all.

3.    The real one was placed within container AVE4041 in the Interline baggage shed at Heathrow before the feeder flight  PA103A arrived from Frankfurt.  It was placed at the bottom front left close to or in the actual position the bomb exploded.  Three witnesses saw it.  Who put it there? Well nobody ever put there hand up.

4. And the second imaginary suitcase?  Well Mr Megrahi was seen on Malta with a brown Samsonite but the evidence of that "witness" Majid Giaka was almost entirely discounted by the Trial Judges (or so they said.)   This imaginary suitcase was smuggled on board flight KM180 at Luqa Airport on the morning on the 21st December 1988 where by coincidence (or not) Megrahi was taking a flight home to Tripoli.   Security at Luqa was tight.  How was it smuggled onto the flight?  Nobody knows.  it was the Crown case that security was circumvented but they didn't even have a theory.

5.   At Frankfurt this imaginary bag was supposedly transferred to the feeder flight PA103A all the while it's timer ticking away.  How was this done?  Well all computerised records were lost but some sort of printout was retrieved which supposedly proved with a lot of mumbo jumbo about baggage trays coding stations and x-ray machines and the bag arrived in Heathrow where with a number of other bags from the feeder flight were placed in AVE4041 on the tarmac on top of several bags that were already within the container (including the real Samsonite.)  The loader then decided to rearrange the bags positioning this new brown Samsonite with another and moving the original brown Samsonite to "some far corner of the container."  Although the loader never actually said he did this.

6.       Doctor Kerr's fascinating book tells the quite remarkable story of how these two brown samsonites became switched.  The imaginary one became real blowing up in exactly the same position the real bag had occupied and the real bag became a phantom disappearing in a puff of smoke or a wormhole!  While there are similarities in the story to other great miscarriage of justice cases (a comparison with Ludovic Kennedy's classic on the Lindbergh case The Airman and the Carpenter springs to mind it's closest parallel is oddly  with the Hans Christian Anderson fable The [Emperor’s] New Clothes.

New Lockerbie blog

A warm welcome to Caustic Logic's new blog The Lockerbie Divide. This contains a series of articles setting out and commenting on the evidence against Megrahi, as well as providing useful links to primary and secondary sources, including many of the documentary films made about the Lockerbie disaster.

I came across the new blog while doing one of my periodical trawls on Google BlogSearch. Caustic Logic tells me that he would have preferred some more lead-in time before publicising the site. He writes:

"Hey, thanks for yet another plug. I wasn't quite ready to announce the new site at large, but close enough. I was hoping you could include this, or something to this effect, in that post?

"For The Lockerbie Divide, which is about ready to announce to the experts anyway, if not the whole world, I'm hoping for input from others. Opinion/analysis essays as well as, especially, just filling in slots like "London Origin Theory" or "Megrahi's links to Mebo", Megrahi's bank account", or "Origins of the drugs theory". Especially I'd be honored to invite Nennt mich einfach Adam!, Aku, Baz, Ebol, Frank Duggan, Michael Follon, Patrick Haseldine, Richard Marquise, Charles, Quincey Riddle, Rolfe, Ruth, Sfm and others I've run into round here. Those interested in contributing directly or with submissions, can contact me by e-mail at: caustic_logic@yahoo.com

"The site name and surface approach are changeable. So far I'm going for a mountain (divide) theme - learning is climbing. I have specific ideas of "surface material" that viewers will see first/grab onto, but would like input there as well. Heck, just criticism and general ideas are valuable."