Lockerbie in Libya

[This is the heading over a section of a long article by Diana Johnstone entitled Gaddafi’s Libya as Demon published today on the CounterPunch website. The section reads in part:]

My visit to Libya in January 2007, to attend an international conference on the International Criminal Court, gave me the opportunity to hold private conversations with a number of well-educated Libyans who clearly knew a lot more about the West than the West knew about them. I was particularly interested in getting the take of unofficial Libyan citizens on two issues that at the time dominated Western perception of Libya: Lockerbie and the affair of the Bulgarian nurses. I should mention that I never got near Gaddafi, and the conference was sponsored by academics who held diverse opinions on important issues, often unlike those of the Leader, which didn’t seem to bother anyone. But on the issue of Lockerbie, I discovered two general widespread points of agreement.

On the one hand, nobody believed that Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. It was taken for granted that Libya had been unfairly accused for political reasons.

On the other hand, it was clear that the sanctions imposed by the West to punish Libya for its alleged guilt had caused hardship and discontent. The power of the West both to impose sanctions and to project its images amounts to serious interference in the domestic politics of targeted countries, since very many people, especially the young, want to live in a “normal” country and may resent leaders who cause them to be treated as pariahs by the West. Therefore, it was understood that Gaddafi had finally given in to Western pressure to accept responsibility – but not guilt – for Lockerbie merely in order to get the unpopular sanctions lifted. The fact that he agreed to turn over two Libyan citizens to a Western court to be tried for the crime and to pay over two billion dollars of compensation to the victims was explicitly not an admission of guilt, but rather a response to blackmail by Great Powers in order to normalize relations and improve daily life.

This did not surprise me, since over the years I had read a lot about the Lockerbie case. Indeed, a great deal has been written exposing the weakness of the prosecution’s case, based on a totally implausible scenario (a bomb to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight was allegedly sent via airports in Malta, Frankfurt and London), technical “evidence” that had been tampered with by CIA agents, and a witness who was richly rewarded for testimony which did not fit the facts. All this has been told many times, for instance Andrew Cockburn in the CounterPunch newsletter [RB: A related account by Alexander Cockburn is available here], or the London Review of Books, The Framing of al-Megrahi by British lawyer Gareth Peirce. But the fact that the case has been repeatedly exposed by careful analysis as a probable frame-up has not made the slightest impression on mainstream media and politicians who continue to blast Gaddafi as the monster who ordered the Lockerbie massacre.

One may add that at the time of the event in 1988, it was widely assumed that Iran had ordered the attack in retaliation for US downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf. When the United States, switching from its anti-Iran alliance with Iraq to war against Saddam Hussein, decided to accuse Libya instead, no motive was ever produced. But when a “dictator” has been stigmatized as a monster, no motive is needed. He just did it because that is the sort of thing evil dictators are supposed to do.

The two accused Libyan airline employees working in Malta had been put on trial in 2000 by three Scottish judges without a jury in a specially built court in the Netherlands. One of the Libyans was acquitted and the other, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. The United Nations observer at this peculiar trial, Hans Köchler, called the guilty verdict “incomprehensible”, “arbitrary, even irrational” and noted “an air of international power politics” surrounding the proceedings.

On November 12, 2006, the Glasgow Sunday Herald quoted top State Department legal advisor Michael Scharf, who was the counsel to the US counter-terrorism bureau when the two Libyans were indicted for the bombing, as calling the case “so full of holes it was like Swiss cheese” and said it should never have gone to trial. He claimed the CIA and FBI had assured State Department officials there was an “iron-clad” case against the two Libyans, but that in reality the intelligence agencies knew well in advance of the trial that their star witness was “a liar”. But Great Powers can’t back down. Their sacred “credibility” is at stake. In short, they must keep lying to preserve the illusion of infallibility.

At the time I was in Tripoli, the defense team of the convicted Libyan was trying to appeal the conviction to a higher court. I was able to call on one of the lawyers on Megrahi’s defense team. I spent a long time in her office, trying to overcome her reluctance to speak about the case. Finally, she agreed to talk to me when I promised to keep our conversation to myself, so as not to risk harming the appeal. By now, the circumstances have changed drastically.

Here, briefly, is what she told me.

The Scottish judges were under enormous pressure to convict the two Libyans. After all, for years their guilt had been trumpeted by the United States demanding that they be “brought to justice”. A special court had been set up with the obvious purpose of convicting them. Yet the evidence which would merit conviction in a proper Scottish court was simply not there. The best the judges dared to do was to acquit one of the defendants and pass along the responsibility for acquitting the other to a higher court. But to the dismay of the Libyan defense team, the designated court of appeals evaded the dangerous issue (...)

[O]n June 28, 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which had been investigating the case since 2003, recommended that Abdel Basset al-Megrahi be granted a second appeal against his conviction. The Commission said it had uncovered six separate grounds for considering that the conviction may have been an injustice. The announcement caused a sensation in the small circles following the affair. It seemed that Scottish justice was courageous enough to assert itself and allow hearings that would expose the CIA frame-up.

That sort of thing may happen in movies, but the real world is something else.

A sordid bargain

What happened after that helped set the stage for the NATO attack on Libya this year.

Time passed. It was two years later, in April 2009, that the appeal finally was due to get underway. But meanwhile, behind the scenes, secret bargaining was going on, amid leaks and rumors.

On August 21, 2009, on grounds that he was suffering from terminal cancer, Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was released from prison in Scotland by the Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill and allowed to “go home to die”.

Now, it so happens that in 2007, Tony Blair went to Libya to negotiate a British-Libyan agreement with Gaddafi covering law, extradition and prisoner transfer. Under this Prisoner Transfer Agreement, Libyan authorities asked for Megrahi to be sent home due to his illness.

The catch was that the Prisoner Transfer Agreement could be applied only when no legal proceedings were outstanding. So in order to benefit from it, Megrahi had to drop his appeal.

The matter is confused by the fact that he was formally released on “compassionate” grounds. One way or another, the deal was clear: al-Megrahi could go home, but the appeal was dead. Hans Koechler, UN-appointed special observer to the Lockerbie trial, thought Megrahi may have been subjected to “morally outrageous” blackmail to abandon his appeal against his will.

The sordid aspect of this bargain is that it deprived Megrahi of the right to clear his name, while leaving the CIA frame-up officially unexposed. There was nothing to counter the chorus of protestations from Hillary Clinton on down denouncing Scotland for having “freed the Lockerbie bomber”. Two years later, news that Megrahi has failed to die has elicited further indignation from Western media, who see this as proof that the UK had “sold the Lockerbie bomber for Libyan oil”. Naturally, the impression must be conveyed that the sly Libyan dictator tricked the naïve but greedy Brits into selling out their principles for petroleum.

But it is just as likely that it was the naïve Libyan dictator who was tricked by the unscrupulous British into thinking he had made a “gentleman’s agreement”. Rather than pursue an appeal which risked causing acute embarrassment to Western authorities, Megrahi could be released and the matter forgotten. The popular rejoicing at Megrahi’s return home was muted in Libya, but Western media pretended to be scandalized that a convicted mass murderer received a hero’s welcome. In reality, he was welcomed home discreetly as an innocent man who had been unjustly convicted, not as a mass murderer. And whenever he has been able to make himself heard, he has reiterated his desire to clear his name.

Pro-Megrahi backers flayed by new Lord Advocate

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater (whose views on Lockerbie are well-known) in today’s edition of The Times.  It reads as follows:]

Scotland’s Lord Advocate has launched a powerful and stinging attack against “conspiracy theorists” who claim that the Lockerbie bomber was wrongly convicted.

In the most detailed rebuttal yet made to the case mounted by campaigners who argue that Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was innocent and that Libya was not involved in the terrorist bomb plot that brought Pan Am 103 down over Lockerbie 24 years ago today, Frank Mulholland, QC, calls the allegations “without foundation”.

He goes on to accuse those making them of uttering “defamatory” comments against High Court judges who are unable to respond. [RB: Justice for Megrahi has made no defamatory comments against any High Court judge.  It is not defamatory of the Zeist judges to say that they were wrong in finding Megrahi guilty. Lawyers all the time say that judges got things wrong (and almost every time an appeal is allowed, other judges say so too). And in the Lockerbie case even the SCCRC concluded that, on an absolutely crucial point, no reasonable court could have reached the conclusion that the Zeist judges reached.  JFM in its recent allegations of criminality was very careful not to say that then Lord Advocate (and now High Court judge) Colin Boyd had attempted to pervert the course of justice.]

Mr Mulholland, who has relaunched an investigation into what he calls an act of “state-sponsored terrorism” by the former Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, says that he has been through all the evidence and is convinced that al-Megrahi’s conviction was “safe”.

An outside counsel invited by the Lord Advocate to conduct an independent review of the evidence has also concluded that the conviction was sound. [RB: It would be interesting to know the identity of this outside counsel.  Here, by contrast, is a short list of eminent lawyers who have concluded that the conviction was not sound: Benedict Birnberg, Gareth Peirce, Michael Mansfield QC, David Wolchover, Len Murray, Ian Hamilton QC, Jock Thomson QC, John Scott QC.  There are many more.]

“I am hugely frustrated that there is an unfounded attack on the integrity of the judges involved in the process,” Mr Mulholland said. “I saw a report on the BBC that [claimed] a high court judge — Colin Boyd, Lord Advocate at the time — perverted the course of justice. And it frustrates me that they’re not in a position to answer these allegations, these can be made without being challenged and without any real foundation.” [RB: At least Mr Mulholland does not here make the error of accusing JFM of responsibility for the BBC’s egregious misinterpretation of the English language.]

He compared the allegations to the uncontrolled media attempts to blacken the name of Lord MacAlpine, the former Conservative Party treasurer, over child abuse.

“I deplore any of that,” he said. “The appropriate place for voicing any concerns about the evidence is before a court of law, not in the court of public opinion, or the media. I haven’t spoken to the people who are affected by this, but I would imagine that they are frustrated that their reputations can be so easily attacked, and they can’t do anything about it.”

Mr Mulholland, who has been to Libya to make contact with the new regime, is hopeful that permission will be given soon to send Scottish police officials to Tripoli to gather evidence that would not only buttress the case against al-Megrahi, but reopen the wider plot to down the US airliner.

He believes that a criminal investigation rather than a public inquiry is the best way to resolve the 1988 Lockerbie case.

“I take the view that the calls for a public inquiry are essentially to set up a vehicle which would be a surrogate criminal court, he said. “I believe that the guilt or innocence of al-Megrahi is entirely a matter for the courts.”

He issued a challenge to the al-Megrahi apologists: “If you don’t like the set-up of the justice system, then what you do is you change it, through the democratic vehicle of parliament. You change the law.”

Mr Mulholland says he has studied all the claims advanced in the book Megrahi: You are my Jury by the writer John Ashton, and finds no evidence to support them. He urged those arguing that al-Megrahi was innocent to put any additional evidence to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

“Mr Megrahi stood trial before a Scottish court and was convicted by three judges unanimously, then an appeal, where five judges unanimously upheld the conviction, hearing additional evidence about the Heathrow break-in [the claim that the bomb went aboard there],” he said. “Having heard all the arguments presented to them, they upheld the conviction. Part of our justice system is the [commission] for which I have the highest regard. Anyone who is concerned about a conviction can make an application to the commission.”

He added: “The commission had access to all the Crown’s papers, and they took the view that in relation to a very limited number of grounds, the case should be referred back to the appeal court, which they did. The defence were entitled to expand the appeal beyond the grounds of referral, and they included a number of grounds which had been rejected by the commission, and the court was in the process of hearing that appeal when al-Megrahi abandoned his appeal.

“Now, whatever you think, and everyone is entitled to their view as to whether he is guilty or not, the courts took the view that following a trial and an appeal and a subsequent appeal, which was abandoned, al-Megrahi’s conviction still stands and that is the application of the rule of law.”

Mr Mulholland believes the evidence shows that the previous Libyan regime under Colonel Gaddafi was involved in “an act of state-sponsored terrorism”.

He is working with the FBI, the US Attorney-General and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to pursue investigations. “We are applying the rule of law,” he said. “If you follow the evidence, it leads to Libya.”

Tainting evidence -- the FBI crime laboratory

[On this date in 1995 the FBI crime laboratory was the subject of a highly critical television programme broadcast on the ABC network. It followed disclosures by one of the laboratory’s scientists, Dr Frederic Whitehurst, about the methods adopted by some of his colleagues, including Tom Thurman. The scandal later became the subject of a book, Tainting Evidence, by John Kelly and Phillip Wearne. The relevance of this to the Lockerbie case is outlined in the following excerpt from Gareth Peirce’s article The Framing of al-Megrahi in the London Review of Books:]

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’.

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya.

Thurman and the circuit board fragment

[On this date in 1991, Tom Thurman of the FBI appeared on television claiming to have been the person who identified the fragment of circuit board that linked Libya to the bombing of Pan Am 103. What follows is excerpted from Gareth Peirce’s article The framing of al-Megrahi:]

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in ... therefore fabricating evidence’.

[Also on this date in 1991, Libya delivered to the United Nations Security Council a letter “categorically denying that Libya had any association” with the Lockerbie bombing.]

Pilger on Libya and Megrahi

[The following is an extract from an article by John Pilger published yesterday on the Information Clearing House website:]

Gone from the Murdoch press are pejorative "insurgents". The action in Libya, says The Times, is "a revolution... as revolutions used to be". That it is a coup by a gang of Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato is hardly news. The self-appointed "rebel leader", Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was Gaddafi's feared justice minister. The CIA runs or bankrolls most of the rest, including America's old friends, the Mujadeen Islamists who spawned al-Qaeda.

 

They told journalists what they needed to know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no evidence, unlike the abundant evidence of "rebel" massacres of black African workers falsely accused of being mercenaries. European bankers' secret transfer of the Central Bank of Libya from Tripoli to "rebel" Benghazi by European bankers in order to control the country's oil billions was an epic heist of little interest.

The entirely predictable indictment of Gaddafi before the "international court" at The Hague evokes the charade of the dying "Lockerbie bomber", Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, whose "heinous crime" has been deployed to promote the west's ambitions in Libya. In 2009, al-Megrahi was sent back to Libya by the Scottish authorities not for compassionate reasons, as reported, but because his long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his innocence and described how he was framed by the Thatcher government, as the late Paul Foot's landmark expose revealed. As an antidote to the current propaganda, I urge you to read a forensic demolition of al-Megrahi's "guilt" and its political meaning in Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice (Verso) by the distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce.

Lockerbie prosecutors "afflicted by wilful blindness"

[What follows is an article by Mark Hirst published today on the Russian Sputnik News website:]

Scottish prosecutors involved in the investigation of Lockerbie bombing in 1988 are “afflicted by wilful blindness” by ignoring concerns from distinguished UK lawyers, Robert Black QC, a Professor of Scots law has told Sputnik.

Scottish state prosecutors involved in the investigation of the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie in 1988 are “afflicted by wilful blindness” by ignoring concerns from distinguished UK lawyers about the safety of the conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Robert Black QC, a Professor of Scots law has told Sputnik.

“[Prosecutors] must be afflicted by wilful blindness or by unquestioning loyalty to the Crown Office party line,” Black told Sputnik Sunday.

“Among the distinguished lawyers who have expressed grave concerns about the evidence are Sir Gerald Gordon QC -- who was in charge of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) investigation in 2003 to 2007 -- Michael Mansfield QC, Anthony Lester QC, Gareth Peirce, Benedict Birnberg and Jock Thomson QC,” Black added.

At a service in Washington to mark the 26th anniversary since the bombing that claimed 270 lives, the worst single terrorist attack in British history, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, who heads Scotland’s prosecution, known as the Crown Office, told American relatives, “During the 26-year long inquiry not one Crown Office investigator or prosecutor has raised a concern about the evidence in this case.

“We remain committed to this investigation and our focus remains on the evidence, and not on speculation and supposition,” Mulholland added.

Black, along with many UK relatives of victims, has long claimed the prosecution of Megrahi was a miscarriage of justice. The Professor is currently campaigning to have a public inquiry established that would review all the evidence, including new information that, campaigners believe, throws fresh doubt over prosecution claims that Libya was responsible for the attack.

But Black told Sputnik the first step would be to overturn Megrahi’s guilty verdict.

“I think we may get there eventually,” Black told Sputnik referring to the prospects of securing an independent public inquiry. “But realistically the conviction will have to be overturned first – hopefully as a result of the current SCCRC application culminating in a reference back to the High Court.”

Megrahi, who was suffering from terminal cancer, was released on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government in 2009 and returned to Libya where he died in 2012. In June this year the Libyan’s relatives instructed a Scottish lawyer, Aamer Anwar, to start the process that they hope will lead to an appeal being heard in the Scottish High Court.

But Black told Sputnik that although a posthumous appeal was allowed under Scots law the process was not straightforward.

“The main obstacles are firstly the High Court's power to refuse to hear an appeal even when allowed by the SCCRC,” Black told Sputnik.

“The second obstacle is the tactic of delay. This was the Crown's principal tactic in the last Megrahi appeal, exercised so successfully that a case that should have been concluded before Megrahi’s illness was diagnosed had only just started when he had to apply for compassionate release. I have no doubt that [prosecutors] will use it again. Dragging things out adds to the expenses of the appellants – who will not this time be subsidised by the Libyan government – and the Crown will hope that they run out of money,” Black said.

In 2007 the SCCRC, following a four-year investigation into the case, concluded there were six grounds to refer the case back to the court of appeal, concluding that there may have been a miscarriage of justice. Shortly after the UK Government secured a Public Interest Immunity order preventing key evidence from being given to the defence that might assist in Megrahi’s defence.

“They will again assert Public Interest Immunity in respect of the document relating to timers that formed the basis of two of the SCCRC's grounds of referral in 2007,” Black told Sputnik. “This, of course, will contribute to delay and expense.”

The framing of al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a long and detailed article -- 6500 words -- by Gareth Peirce in the current issue of the London Review of Books. It is an utterly devastating critique of the Lockerbie trial and what led up to it and flowed from it. Anyone interested in the Lockerbie affair needs to read and digest it in full. The following are extracts.] Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process. (...) [A] number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends. Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police. (...) Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution. In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket. All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. (...) It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found. (...) That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit. Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading army. The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated. (...) The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links. Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years. On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’. (...) There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive. (...) No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes. Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? (...) To discover that al-Megrahi’s conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and ‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he ‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi ‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars. That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’ (‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained. Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning’.

Making curiosity uncool…

[This is the heading over an item posted today on bensix's blog Back Towards The Locus. It contains the following:]

I’ve noted how media critics of “conspiracy theories” aren’t just opposed to grandiose, unfounded claims but to suspicion of official or quasi-official narratives. Here are some notes on how the charge of “conspiracy theory” works to discredit this scepticism.

For example, with regards to the Pan Am attack, Geoffrey Robertson wasted no time in dismissing sceptics of Megrahi’s guilt…

"If Megrahi was guilty of the Lockerbie bombing (and, conspiracy theories aside, the evidence justified the verdict), then Gaddafi must have given the order…"

I will say this for Robertson: he’s remarkably efficient. What’s the point of explaining the biased procedure, dodgy witnesses and meager evidence of the prosecution when you can dismiss all scepticism as the work of minor nutjobs?

[RB: Quite. Minor nutjobs like Benedict Birnberg, Ian Hamilton QC, Hans Koechler, Anthony Lester QC, Len Murray, Gareth Peirce and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, to name but a few.]

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.)  

"I am desperate for the truth of the matter to come out..."

[This is the heading over an item posted yesterday on the Lallands Peat Worrier blog, following the publication of the official report of the Scottish Parliament Public Petitions Committee's most recent consideration of the Justice for Megrahi petition. The discussion was as follows:]

The Convener: PE1370 is on justice for Megrahi. I refer members to the clerks' paper and invite comments from the committee.

Nanette Milne: I find this to be a difficult petition to deal with. There is an option to get an update from the Scottish Government on its plans for legislation regarding the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. Beyond that, however, I think that the committee has gone as far as it can with the petition. I know that I have been a bit reluctant to refer petitions to subject committees, but this is clearly one to refer to the Justice Committee.

Sandra White: It is an extremely important petition on a subject that people have various views on. It could be controversial, but I think that it is an honest petition that is seeking the truth. I was not a member of the previous session's committee, which deliberated on the petition. Would it be sufficient for the Public Petitions Committee to ask the Scottish Government to open an inquiry, or would it be better to send the petition to the Justice Committee with the recommendation that the Government pursue an inquiry? My problem is that I do not want it to get hidden in the Justice Committee stuff and not come back out again.

Kevin Stewart: I agree that the petition should go to the Justice Committee. As a new member of Parliament, I should probably declare an interest in that I may have signed the petition—I am not quite sure. If I did not, I probably did not see it, otherwise I would have signed it. It is a matter for the Justice Committee and we should allow that committee to have a clear look at it.

The Convener: I should have mentioned that Jim Swire and Robert Forrester are present. I thank them for the comprehensive work that they have done on the petition and for referring us to the interview with Gareth Peirce, "The Quiet Storm", which made fascinating reading.

Bill Walker: I am desperate for the truth of the matter to come out. It is fundamental that the truth come out, and we should do everything that we can to help it to come out. I agree with Kevin Stewart that the petition should go to the Justice Committee, although I was a bit concerned when Sandra White said that it might get buried in that committee's paperwork. The terrible events happened a long time ago so we must get to the truth sooner rather than later. Let us not let the Justice Committee bury it.

The Convener: I cannot make any predictions about other committees, but given Christine Grahame's interest in the matter, I would be extremely surprised if the petition did not have a high profile in the Justice Committee.

John Wilson: You said it, convener. The interest of the new convener of the Justice Committee in the matter will do the petition justice and ensure that the issues that have been raised are examined. The previous Public Petitions Committee tried to deal with the petition although it came to the committee late in the previous session. However, the responses that we have received and the further evidence that has been submitted by the petitioners indicate that the matter is for the Justice Committee to consider. The petition raises a number of concerns about who takes responsibility for what decisions in relation to the process of appeals within the Scottish criminal justice system, so I would be happy to see it passed on to the Justice Committee.

The Convener: If no member wishes to make any further comment, we will move on. It is agreed that we will refer the petition to the Justice Committee under rule 15.6.2?

Members indicated agreement.

Blair spinning again on Pan Am 103

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. The first paragraph reads as follows:]

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has refused to address criticisms made by solicitor Gareth Peirce of his role in the repatriation of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, but has instead issued a two year old “response“ to The Firm on the basis that “none of the facts have changed”.

Scottish legal system refusing to face the fact that it made a dreadful mistake

[What follows is the text of a section of Robin Ramsay's The View from the Bridge (starting on page 11) in the current issue (no 77, Summer 2019) of Lobster magazine:]

On 21 March the front page of The Times had a story headlined ‘Former Stasi agents questioned over role in Lockerbie bombing’. It reported that ‘nine officials from the Scottish Crown Office are focusing on the role of the East German intelligence service’ in the event. The piece had three authors, one of them being Magnus Linklater, sometime editor of The Scotsman and much else besides[1]. I shared a platform with Mr Linklater last autumn in Edinburgh. We were nominally discussing conspiracy theories and Linklater regaled us with his experiences on the so-called ‘Hitler diaries’ story while at The Sunday Times. He also told us that he believed the official version of Lockerbie, that the Libyans had indeed done the bombing. I asked the audience who among them believed this: no-one else did.

By coincidence, on the same day as The Times piece I received a prompt to look at an 8 year-old piece on the Lockerbie plane bombing which is on Cryptome[2]. The article, ‘Policing Lockerbie, A Bella Caledonia Special Investigation’, is no longer on the Bella Caledonia site. Let us take this back a step.

In 2005 The Scotsman ran an article, ‘Police chief – Lockerbie evidence was faked’[3]. This began: 

‘A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement
claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.
The retired officer – of assistant chief constable rank or higher – has
testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in
convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.’[4]

The police officer was not named by The Scotsman. The Bella Caledonia article, however, did name him and it was a legal threat from his lawyer (also reproduced on Cryptome) which resulted in the article being taken off the Bella Caledonia site. [RB: That the person named by Bella Caledonia most certainly was not The Golfer was established on this website here and here.]

That the Libyans did Lockerbie is believed by almost no-one[5]. There was little evidence against the unfortunate Al Megrahi who was convicted of it, and what they had was either paid for by the Americans[6] or fabricated and planted[7]. Former CIA officer Robert Baer told the Daily Telegraph in 2014 that the CIA ‘believed to a man’ that Iran not Libya was behind the attack[8].

A tiny fragment of circuit board purportedly found at the Lockerbie site was allegedly made by the Swiss firm MEBO run by Edwin Bollier. At the trial of Al Megrahi, Bollier was questioned and he acknowledged making electronic equipment for the Stasi and Libya[9]. More than eighteen years after the original wrong verdict, the Scottish Crown office is now talking to former Stasi officers. This suggests that, so long as the Scottish legal system can say that they are still ‘pursuing leads’, it won’t have to face the fact that it made a dreadful mistake in going along with the Americans’ fabrication. 

1 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Linklater.

2 https://cryptome.org/0005/cia-golfer.pdf

3 https://www.scotsman.com/news/police-chief-lockerbie-evidence-was-faked-1-1403341

4 Oddly, The Scotsman has got the year of the Pan Am flight 103 bombing wrong. It was on 21 December in 1988, not 1989. 

5 https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/gareth-peirce/the-framing-of-al-megrahi.

6 The key witness was given $2 million by the US See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/02/lockerbie-documents-witness-megrahi.

7 See, for example, http://tinyurl.com/y2f6aort or https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-6502363/Vital-Lockerbie-evidence-doomed-flight.html and http://tinyurl.com/
yytsht45 or https://gosint.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/lockerbie-30th-anniversary-pt-35bthe-most-expensive-forgery-in-history-poll/. A detailed analysis of (the lack of) evidence is at http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com.

8 http://tinyurl.com/y3aupqsn or https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism- 
in-the-uk/10688412/Lockerbie-bombing-CIA-believes-to-a-man-that-Iran-carried-out-attackon-Pan-Am-Flight-103-says-former-agent.html

9 Bollier and Mebo were discussed by Simon Matthews towards the end of his ‘The devil has all the best songs: reflections on the life and times of Simon Dee’ in Lobster 58. See https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster58/lobster58.pdf. On this account Bollier looks more like a CIA asset than anything else. Mr Bollier has his own Website on which some of the Lockerbie issues are discussed. See
http://www.mebocom-defilee.ch.