US gagging orders in Lockerbie case

[On this date in 2000, Lamin Fhimah’s solicitor wrote to Dr Richard Fuisz. The account that follows is excerpted from an item on John Ashton’s website Megrahi: You are my Jury. The documents which are referred to can be read here.]

Dr Richard Fuisz was an international businessman and deep-cover CIA spy,  who worked in the USSR and across the Middle East during the Eighties and Nineties. As well as having a very successful medical technology company, he ran training programmes for the Saudi military, supplied computers with a secret spying capability to the unwitting Soviets (via Raisa Gorbachev) and had a model agency that supplied the first Miss USSR.

In May 2000, not long after the start of the Lockerbie trial, the defence lawyers got wind of Fuisz, via an associate of his, Susan Lindauer, who said that he had been based in Syria in 1988 and had irrefutable intelligence that Lockerbie was the work of the PFLP-GC. Lindauer also said that he was the subject of a gagging order, a breach of which would result in a significant prison sentence.

On 31 May [2000], defence solicitor Eddie MacKechnie wrote to the US department of justice’s Lockerbie prosecutor Brian Murtagh to ask if Fuisz was indeed prevented from speaking (Document 1). Six weeks later Murtagh wrote back. He confirmed that Fuisz was the subject of a gagging order in relation to another case, which involved the supply of military equipment to Iraq by a company called Terex, however, he claimed that Fuisz was free to talk about Lockerbie, writing: “I found no factual basis to the allegation that any representative of the US Government has taken any action to deter Dr Fuisz from talking to anyone about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.” (See Document 2)

Fuisz insisted that this was not true and that he was the subject of another gagging order that was quite independent of the Terex litigation. Furthermore, he claimed that Murtagh and another DoJ lawyer had advised him that he was not in fact free to talk about Lockerbie. (See Document 3)

Murtagh again denied it, telling MacKechnie: “You ask whether or not you can assume that the defense is at liberty to ask Dr Fuisz any questions in relation to Pan Am 103, and further whether he is fully at liberty to answer any questions relating to Pan Am 103? The answer to both questions as far as I am concerned is “yes”. The problem here is with Dr Fuisz himself, and not with any court order or attempt by the Government to keep him from talking to the defense about the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103.” (See Document 4)

MacKechnie replied: “Dr Fuisz insists that it is not the Department of Justice or even the Attorney General herself which possess the authority to release him from what he refers to as his statutory obligations of secrecy.  It has been suggested to us that the President himself, but perhaps more sensibly the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, would be able to release him from any possible remaining inhibitions so that he could provide a statement in relation to Pan Am 103 and the alleged perpetrators of the bombing.” (See Document 5)

CIA lawyer Robert Eatinger then wrote to Murtagh: “Dr Fuisz has been informed that neither the CIA nor the DoJ pose any objection to his discussing with the defense, or anyone else for that matter, his knowledge of the Pan Am flight 103 bombing. There is and has been no impediment to his being interviewed on this matter… As you and I have discussed, there simply is no court order of which we are aware that in any way limits Dr Fuisz from revealing his knowledge of who bombed Pan Am flight 103. (See Document 6)

The following day, 13 October 2000, Eatinger wrote to Fuisz. Although the letter downplayed Fuisz’s knowledge of Lockerbie, it is highly significant, because it acknowledged de facto that Fuisz was, indeed, involved with the CIA. Moreover, it conceded that he had been briefed by the CIA about Lockerbie and that they had told him that Jibril was to blame. It also tacitly admitted that, contrary to earlier assurances, he was restricted in what he could say. The key passage read:

“Now that you have clarified that you have no personal knowledge of who is responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, we can provide you more specific guidance. You may freely identify the number of briefings you received by CIA officials the dates on which you received them. You may identify whom the CIA briefers said was responsible for the bombing of Pan flight 103. However, you may not reveal the identities of the CIA officers, nor the purpose for which you were receiving these security briefings.” (See Document 7)

Finally, on 6 December 2000, Fuisz was deposed. As well as his own lawyer, a DoJ lawyer and two unnamed CIA officials were also present at the first depositio and three at the second. Fuisz’s story was covered briefly in a few media reports, which suggested that he had been effectively prevented from saying anything that he knew about Lockerbie. However, earlier this year I learnt that this was not true. I came across a lawyer’s note of the first of his two depositions (Document 8) and a transcript of the second (Document 9). Although he was very restricted in what he could say, he nevertheless went on the record with two extraordinary revelations. Firstly, he confirmed that he received multiple briefings from CIA agents in 1989 in which they told him, inter alia, that the PFLP-GC was responsible for Lockerbie. Secondly, and even more significantly, he said that between 1990 and 1995 he was told separately by around 10-15 high level Syrian officials that the group was to blame.  These officials, he said, interacted with the group’s leader, Ahmed Jibril “on a constant basis”.

Lockerbie: the CIA drug-running scenario

[On this date in 2011, Susan Lindauer’s article Lockerbie Diary: Gadhaffi, Fall Guy for CIA Drug Running was published on the Scoop website. The following are excerpts:]

From May 1995 until March 2003, I performed as a back channel to Tripoli and Baghdad, supervised by my CIA handler, Dr Richard Fuisz, who claimed from day one to know the origins of the Lockerbie conspiracy and the identity of the terrorists. http://issuepedia.org/1998-12-04_Susan_Lindauer_Deposition He swore that no Libyan participated in the attack.

Armed with that assurance, our team started talks with Libya's diplomats for the Lockerbie Trial, and I attended over 150 meetings at the Libyan Embassy in New York. After the hand over of Libya's two accused men, our team engaged in a concerted fight to gain permission for Dr. Fuisz to give a deposition about his primary knowledge of the conspiracy, during the Lockerbie Trial In a surprise twist, the US Federal Judge in Alexandria, Virginia imposed a double seal on a crucial portion of Dr Fuisz's deposition. The double seal can only be opened by a Scottish judge. In my opinion, that should be a priority, as testimony hidden by the double seal maps out the whole Lockerbie conspiracy. Most significantly, it identifies 11 terrorists involved in the attack. Dr Fuisz's testimony could put the whole matter to rest forever.

There's good reason for my confidence. Much to my surprise, during the Lockerbie talks, Dr Fuisz's allegations of CIA opium running in Lebanon received unusual corroboration. One day, as I left the office of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun on my lunch break, an older spook caught up with me in front of the US Supreme Court. From out of nowhere, he stepped in my path and invited me to lunch. With extraordinary candor, he debriefed me as to what motivated the CIA's actions. I remember it as one battle-hardened old spook sharing the perils of fieldwork with a gung ho young Asset, anxious to get started on great adventures.

It was a morality tale for sure. According to him, the CIA infiltrated opium and heroin trafficking in Lebanon as part of a crisis operation to rescue AP reporter Terry Anderson and 11 other American and British hostages in Beirut, including CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin and Anglican envoy Terry Waite. The hostage crisis was a legitimate CIA concern. The CIA Station Chief of Beirut, William Buckley, was also kidnapped by Islamic Jihad and brutally tortured to death, his body dumped in the street in front of CIA headquarters. The rescue was protracted and complicated by Lebanon's Civil War—ultimately, Terry Anderson's captivity lasted seven years. Many of the hostages suffered beatings, solitary confinement chained to the floor, and mock executions.

The older spook who refused to identify himself swore that the CIA considered it urgently necessary to try every possibility for recovering the hostages. The concept of infiltration into criminal networks cuts to the murky nature of intelligence itself. Drug enforcement frequently rely on the same strategies. Where the CIA went far wrong was in pocketing some of those heroin profits for itself along the way. The dirty little secret is that the CIA continued to take a percentage cut of opium and heroin production out of Lebanon well into the 1990s.

As for the hostage rescue itself, considering the operation took years to accomplish, it's always been whispered that a corrupted CIA officer enjoying those opium profits might have swallowed reports on the hostages' locations, or otherwise diverted his team in order to protect his narcotics income.

That appears to have become a serious fear at the time, among other US officers jointly involved in the rescue.

In December 1988, infuriated Defense Intelligence agents issued a formal protest, exposing CIA complicity in Middle East heroin trafficking. When teams from both agencies got summoned back to Washington to attend an internal hearing, they boarded Pan Am 103. A wing of militant Hezbollah led by Ahmed Jibril, his nephew Abu Elias, Abu Talb and Abu Nidal took out both teams in order to protect their lucrative cartel.

Classified Defense Intelligence records show that Jibril and Talb had been toying with a conspiracy to bomb a US airplane during the 1988 Christmas holidays anyway. They planned to bomb a US airliner in revenge for the USS Vincennes, which shot down an Iranian commercial airliner loaded with Hajiis returning from Mecca in July, 1988. However the Defense Intelligence threat to expose their heroin network put the bombing plan into action. Islamic Jihad's ability to discover actionable intelligence on the flight schedules would definitely confirm that somebody at CIA was operating as a double agent, keeping Islamic Jihad a step ahead of the rescue efforts.

That's the dirty truth about Lockerbie. It ain't nothing like you've been told. (...)

But the bottom line is that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing of Pan Am 103, which exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. We should care about Lockerbie because of the serious problem that it exposed. Opium trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley provides a major source for global heroin production. In turn, the global pipeline of narco-dollars keep militant operations alive world-wide from the Middle East to Indonesia, Colombia, Burma and the Far East.

Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockerbie, Megrahi, Ashton and Linklater

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

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

Dear Sir,

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

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

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

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

Yours sincerely,

John Ashton

Dear John Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards

Magnus Linklater

Conviction of Megrahi "very shaky indeed"

[The media today contain many reports on the various events that took place yesterday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster.  The following is a selection:]

From The Independent:

'Megrahi was my friend. He did not kill my daughter': Lockerbie father says the British government is not telling the truth about the bombing

The father of one of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing has asked mourners to pray for the "innocent family" of the only person convicted of the worst mass murder in British history, as the nation marked its 25th anniversary.

In his address to a memorial service at Westminster Abbey yesterday evening attended by relatives of the victims, Dr Jim Swire also accused the British government of failing to tell "all the truth they know about this terrible tragedy".

Before the service, the UK, US and Libyan governments in a joint statement promised to work together to "reveal the full facts of the case", saying that they wanted "all those responsible for this most brutal act of terrorism brought to justice, and to understand why it was committed".

Dr Swire said the Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – jailed for life for mass murder but released after eight years in prison on compassionate grounds, as he had terminal cancer – had "died my friend". He also repeated his claim that a convicted terrorist, an Egyptian now living in Sweden, was involved in the bombing.

Dr Swire said he had recently tried to confront that man. "All day long the curtains were drawn shut and the blinds down. Inside was a man who has spent his whole life as a terrorist. I believe he played a key role in the Lockerbie atrocity," he said. "Too afraid to answer the bell himself, he sent his wife to an upstairs window to threaten [me]."

Although he did not name the man, it is understood he was referring to Mohammed Abu Talb, jailed for life for carrying out terrorist bombings in 1985 in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, but since released.

Dr Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was a passenger on the plane, has previously described Talb as "a life-long, proven terrorist". By contrast, Dr Swire said he once received a Christmas card from Megrahi: "In it, he had written, 'Dr Swire and family, please pray for me and my family.' He died my friend.

"Over Christmas, if you pray, please pray for his innocent family, but also for all those who wrestle with hatred, that they may be healed by God's love. Please pray also that we who will sit down at a Christmas table with chairs forever empty may find peace."

Dr Swire also denounced successive British governments. "I claim habeas corpus as I say in this ancient Abbey that I do not believe that our governments have told us all the truth they know about this terrible tragedy," he said.

Speaking yesterday to The Independent on Sunday, Dr Swire reiterated his call for a public inquiry. "If we are not granted an inquiry – and for goodness' sake we've been trying for 25 years to force an inquiry out of them with no results at all – we'll have to go to the European courts and take our own government to court for not meeting their obligations under human rights legislation," he said.

Megrahi's release in 2009 came after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission gave him leave to appeal for a second time, citing six reasons why there were serious concerns about his conviction.

Doubts about his guilt were fuelled on Friday, when it was revealed that Dr Richard Fuisz, a businessman and CIA asset, gave a sworn statement implicating Palestinian militants.

Under oath in 2001, Dr Fuisz told the original defence team that senior Syrian officials had told him that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which was based in Syria, had carried out the bombing. This evidence has never been used in a court.

John Ashton, author of Megrahi: You are my Jury, discovered the deposition by Dr Fuisz buried in the defence team's files. He said it was "hugely significant" and further undermined the case against Megrahi. "It's absolutely scandalous there's never been a public inquiry," he said.

Megrahi's brother, Abdel-Hakim Al-Megrahi, told the BBC that the family planned a posthumous appeal, and hoped the Libyan government would help fund it. "We wish for the truth to be revealed, and this is not just for our own benefit but also for the benefit of the families of the victims and for public opinion," he said. "We need to know who committed this horrible crime."

Professor Hans Koechler, the UN observer at the trial that convicted Megrahi, also called for an inquiry, but feared that "power politics [had] made it impossible for the families to find out what really happened". 

From The Sunday Herald:

Dr Jim Swire, the public face of the British families of the Lockerbie victims, has described Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the attack, as his friend and urged people to pray for the Libyan's family at Christmas.

Speaking at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey yesterday on the 25th anniversary of the atrocity, Swire, who also announced his intention to stand down as the UK's leading Lockerbie campaigner, described the bombing that killed 270 people, including his 23-year-old daughter Flora, as a "revenge attack".

His comments came as the British, American and Libyan governments pledged to work together to uncover "the full facts" of the bombing.

Megrahi was convicted in January 2001 and was given a life sentence. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008, leading to a decision to free him under compassionate release rules. He died in Tripoli, Libya in May last year.

Swire said: "Nelson Mandela made forgiveness look easy. But even a truth and reconciliation commission cannot work unless first the truth is known.

"When I first met the late al-Megrahi face to face in Greenock prison, though he was a practising Muslim, he had bought me a Christmas card in the prison shop. In it he had written, 'Dr Swire and family, please pray for me and my family'.

"He died, my friend. Over Christmas, if you pray, please pray for his innocent family but also for all those who wrestle with hatred, that they may be healed by God's love. Please pray also that we who will sit down at a Christmas table with chairs forever empty may find peace."

Swire added: "In our family, Flora was our beautiful, vivacious first-born of three wonderful children. We are the lucky ones, in the UK and USA. Not only do we live in two of the most free and safe countries in the world but we relatives also had the joy of living with those we loved until their untimely deaths." (...)

Megrahi's family have said they plan to appeal against his conviction. Megrahi died last year protesting his innocence. Now his family hope the Libyan government can help fund the appeal process. His brother Abdel-Hakim al-Megrahi, said: "We want to appeal and we wish for the truth to be revealed. This is not just for our own benefit but also for the benefit of the families of the victims and for public opinion.

"We need to know who committed this horrible crime. But, as you know, we as a family cannot afford to pay for the appeals process.

"God willing, the Libyan government will do this, but it has to be launched by the family first."

Earlier this week, some of the British relatives of Lockerbie victims said they were considering making another appeal against Megrahi's conviction.

Swire, now 77, also told the Sunday Herald about his plans to step back from leading the British families' campaign for justice.

The retired GP said: "I never thought for a moment that we would be in this position 25 years later. We still don't have the truth. And, unfortunately, I can't campaign to get my daughter back. I've always tried to do what Flora would be proud of, she was a seeker after truth herself.

"But I have got to the point where I really have to cut back on it. It's time to relax and leave it to a younger person. The time has come for someone else to take over."

Swire added: "The 25th anniversary is no more poignant than any other, this is a loss we have to live with every day. Flora will never come back. But what makes this loss even harder is that - 25 years on - we still don't have answers."

He admits that the campaign has been a way of coping with the grief for his daughter.

Swire believes that the case against Megrahi was flawed, and has even referred to Megrahi as the "271st victim": "For 25 years, our calls for an inquiry into why Lockerbie was not prevented have been ignored and blocked at every stage. I believe that, eventually, yes, the Megrahi verdict will be overturned."  

From the BBC News website:

Former hostage Terry Waite has said he believes the conviction of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was "very shaky indeed" and has called for a further investigation into the atrocity.

Mr Waite spent nearly five years in captivity after being kidnapped by a cell linked to the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah.

It has been claimed that Libya was wrongly blamed for the Lockerbie bombing, as part of a secret deal to ensure his release from captivity.

Speaking after a memorial service to mark 25 years since the bombing, he told the BBC: "I'm not sure we've got to the truth yet." 

From the Truth Frequency Radio website:
Today is the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing on Dec 21, 1988 – and a surprising mellow day of personal vindication for your host, Susan Lindauer! Today the Telegraph in London published the first mainstream press admission that the CIA has always known the PFLP headed by Ahmed Jibril was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103. I recounted the 25 year fight to expose the truth, including the sacrifices of Lester Coleman, author of the incredible book, Trail of the Octopus. After battling for years, today we triumphed.