Where, I ask, is the justice?

[What follows is excerpted from an article published today on the CNN Politics website:]

[Robert] Mueller, now 73, began his Department of Justice career in 1976 as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, and during the decades that followed took only two breaks to try out the private sector, each lasting no more than a couple of years.

The stints were so short-lived because of a simple fact, according to Graff: Mueller couldn't stand defending those he felt were guilty. (...)

That black-and-white outlook served Mueller well at the Department of Justice, where he oversaw some of the highest-profile cases of the last few decades including the prosecution of mobster John Gotti and Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega. But it was his investigation into the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that would most profoundly affect him.

"It was a very personal and a pivotal investigation of his career," according to Lisa Monaco, who served as Mueller's chief of staff when he was FBI director. "It is something that has stuck with him, and I think it was because he was so affected by walking the ground in Lockerbie after that plane went down, seeing the remnants of that plane, seeing the piecing together of the plane and the Christmas presents the passengers on that plane were carrying home to their family members, and seeing that all literally get pieced together in a warehouse in Scotland at the beginning of the investigation."

For years after the trial of the two Libyan terrorists, Mueller would quietly attend the annual December memorial service organized by the families, consoling those he had come to know well. When Scottish authorities announced in 2009 that they were releasing the one terrorist convicted in the case, Mueller was outraged.

"That did not sit well with him. He thought it was an injustice, a fundamental injustice for the families, and he did something very out-of-the-ordinary for him," Monaco said.

Mueller wrote a scathing letter to the Scottish authorities, saying in part, "your action makes a mockery of the grief of the families who lost their own. ... Where, I ask, is the justice?"

It was an unusual outpouring of emotion for a man who, according to those closest to him, regularly keeps to himself.

Stalinist thinking about the infallibility of police and prosecutors

[On this date in 2009, I posted on this blog an item headed That letter from the FBI to the Justice Secretary: is it real?  The first of its two sentences read simply “This is the heading over a devastating exposure by Jonathan Mitchell QC on his blog of the misconceptions and errors of fact and law in the letter from the Director of the FBI to Kenny MacAskill.” Mr Mitchell’s article reads as follows:]

My last post covered two issues; the hypocrisy of the attack on the decision to release Megrahi, and the law relative to compassionate release of prisoners in Scotland. But in linking these I noted in passing that much of the attack on MacAskill was simply ignorant, and wrote “FBI Director Robert Mueller, in his much-quoted open letter to MacAskill, obviously intended primarily for US domestic consumption, thought the Justice Secretary was a ‘prosecutor‘.“. That touched a nerve with one anonymous commenter, who wrote me a poison-pen message in the middle of which he stated:

The first paragraph of the FBI director’s letter he’s clearly putting it forth that he generally stays out of another jurisdiction’s case–in his experience as a prosecutor the cases of other prosecutors–though the phraseology might be a good target for a pendant punching above his weight class. Indeed, in the US and presumably Scotland, the prosecutor’s ultimate boss is the Attorney General of the US (or Justice Minister there). When the director talks about the effect of the release it is on terrorists in general and their conviction in a ‘…the conviction of trial by jury’. He obviously means it in a general sense or perhaps you’d have his sentence read something like ‘…the conviction of trial by jury–unless of course the crime is one that the statute allows the defendant to select a panel of judges or a judge instead–after the defendant is given all due process…’.

Now, I wouldn’t normally bother about poison-pen writers, but this made me go back to the letter to see if I had misread it. I didn’t. It contains glaring errors about the Lockerbie process. But what on reflection is interesting is that Robert Mueller is an extremely experienced lawyer who worked for many years on the Lockerbie prosecution, (although he was not, as the letter claims, ‘in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991‘; that was the Lord Advocate). It seems inconceivable that he would not have known the truth; and I don’t believe he actually can have been as ignorant as I suggested. I apologise for that. I have to wonder if he actually wrote this letter, with its collection of howlers. Let’s look at what it says, and at the true facts.

The first weird statement is the one about staying out of another jurisdiction’s cases, to use the commenter’s re-hash. This is what Mueller wrote:

Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision.

Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case.

Now, the ‘practice‘ he says he’s abandoning is the practice that he does not ‘comment on the actions of other prosecutors‘. But the Justice Secretary is not a prosecutor; he has nothing to do with the prosecution process. He is not the ‘prosecutor’s ultimate boss‘; that’s the Lord Advocate, whose constitutional independence of the Justice Secretary is fundamental to the system. Section 48 (5) of the Scotland Act states “Any decision of the Lord Advocate in his capacity as head of the systems of criminal prosecution and investigation of deaths in Scotland shall continue to be taken by him independently of any other person.” 1. If the Justice Secretary tried to tell prosecutors what to do, or how to do it, he would be told to sling his hook; and vice versa. Robert Mueller knows this. He is not stupid. He worked with several Lord Advocates over many years. If Robert Mueller wrote the quotation above, he was telling a deliberate untruth. That seems strange. Why should he bother, just for a minor rhetorical flourish? It seems more likely that the author was some minion who shared the lazy assumption of my commenter that the Justice Secretary just had to be a prosecutor, because that’s the American system.

Now, later in the letter the same howler is repeated in different language:

You apparently made this decision without regard to the views of your partners in the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the Lockerbie tragedy.

The Justice Secretary is not a ‘partner in investigation and prosecution‘, any more than he is a ‘partner’ of the accused or the defence. He is independent of both, as a judge is. Here again we see language that suggests a basic ignorance of the separation of powers.

There’s another error which I didn’t mention, the reference to ‘conviction by jury‘, which Anonymous nevertheless identifies and defends:

Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime, the terrorist will be freed …

It seems obvious from this language that its author thought Megrahi was convicted ‘by jury‘. But Mueller knows as well as Megrahi himself that he was not. He sat through much if not all of the trial. Here, again, it seems extraordinary that for a pointless two words Mueller would write something which he knew perfectly well was wrong. Juries are fundamental to the American system (except, of course, for alleged terrorists), but surely Mueller knows they aren’t the norm in most countries affected by terrorism.

There are other errors, most notably the central fatuous and hysterical claim that the release will give comfort to terrorists: what will actually give them comfort is the Faustian pact of successive American and British governments to forgive the entire chain of command in the Libyan intelligence service and government so as to encourage business opportunities2. If you cheerfully sup with the devil, you… the reader can complete this sentence.

Yet neither Mueller nor the FBI have ever gone on record as critical of the decision of successive US administrations to grant amnesty and forgiveness to those who, they say, gave Megrahi his orders; to give them hospitality, trade with them, sell them military equipment.

So I have to ask: who actually wrote this letter? If it was Robert Mueller, he must have been on the juice, which may perhaps have been what Lord Fraser had in mind when he kindly suggested Mueller visit Scotland to ‘discuss some good whisky‘. If it was some underling, he didn’t do his homework.

Whoever it was, it was someone with the Stalinist thinking about the infallibility of police and prosecutors which coloured the UK governments strenuous efforts to keep the evidence in the recent appeal effectively secret, but in a less disguised form. Look at this:

… only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision.

That’s the thinking that led to the founding of the Cheka in 1918. As Hector MacQueen pointed out, it’s the old chestnut that we don’t need courts or judges to “reach the appropriate decision“; still less any defence. The prosecution, after all, is infallible. No wonder then, perhaps, that the writer of this letter, whoever he or she may have been, was so appalled at anyone not following its instructions. Thus the complaint “You never once sought our opinion” on the release. As the Justice Secretary rightly pointed out in Parliament, however, in Scotland “we have separation of powers“. Someone in the FBI, however, does not believe in this.

There’s a phrase for this, and the phrase is ‘police state’.

1. See this description in a recent paper by the Judiciary on reform of the Lord Advocate’s status for a fuller analysis.
2. Musa Kusa, who the British government expelled in 1980 after he announced “The revolutionary committees have decided last night to kill two more people in the United Kingdom. I approve of this“, and who the CIA found had direct responsibility for the PanAm 103 bomb (and indeed many other murders), was in 2003 entertained by both governments in the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London. The last time I was in the Travellers Club, I noticed the fine portrait of Lord Castlereagh half-way up the staircase. He was the Foreign Secretary of whom Shelley wrote in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ ‘I met Murder on the way/He had a mask like Castlereagh/Very smooth he looked, yet grim/Seven bloodhounds followed him/All were fat, and well they might/Be in admirable plight/For one by one and two by two/He tossed them human hearts to chew/Which from his wide cloak he drew…‘ . Was the setting deliberate? Castlereagh would have been an appropriate host.

‘‘We brought in the CIA... the Scots… MI5”

[What follows is excerpted from a long article headlined How Donald Trump Misunderstood the FBI that was published yesterday in The New York Times Magazine:]

President George W Bush [chose] Robert Mueller as the sixth director of the FBI.

Born into a wealthy family, Mueller exemplified ‘‘the tradition of the ‘muscular Christian’ that came out of the English public-school world of the 19th century,’’ Maxwell King, Mueller’s classmate at St Paul’s, the elite New England prep school, told me. Mueller arrived at FBI headquarters with a distinguished military record — he earned a bronze star as a Marine in Vietnam — and years of service as a United States attorney and Justice Department official. It was a week before the Sept 11 attacks, and he was inheriting an agency ill suited for the mission that would soon loom enormously before it. Richard A Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, later wrote that [Louis] Freeh’s FBI had not done enough to seek out foreign terrorists. Clarke also wrote that Freeh’s counterterror chief, Dale Watson, had told him: ‘‘We have to smash the FBI into bits and rebuild it.’’

Mueller had already earned the respect of the FBI rank and file during his tenure as chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department. When he started work at the Justice Department in 1990, the FBI had been trying and failing for two years to solve the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. ‘‘The FBI was not set up to deal with a major investigation like this,’’ Richard Marquise, an FBI intelligence analyst who became the leader of the Lockerbie investigation under Mueller, said in an FBI oral history. ‘‘I blame the institution.’’

Mueller used his power under law to obliterate the FBI’s byzantine flow charts of authority in the case. ‘‘We literally cut out the chains of command,’’ Marquise said. ‘‘We brought in the CIA. We brought the Scots. We brought MI5 to Washington. And we sat down and we said: ‘We need to change the way we’re doing business.... We need to start sharing information.’ ’’ It was a tip from the Scots that put Marquise on the trail of the eventual suspect: one of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi’s intelligence officers, whose cover was security chief for the Libyan state airlines. Qaddafi’s spy, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991. It took until the turn of the 21st century, but he was convicted.

It meant a great deal to Mueller, in the Lockerbie case, that the evidence the FBI produced be deployed as evidence in court, not justification for war. In a speech he gave at Stanford University in 2002, concerning the nation’s newest threat, he spoke of ‘‘the balance we must strike to protect our national security and our civil liberties as we address the threat of terrorism.’’ He concluded: ‘‘We will be judged by history, not just on how we disrupt and deter terrorism, but also on how we protect the civil liberties and the constitutional rights of all Americans, including those Americans who wish us ill. We must do both of these things, and we must do them exceptionally well.’’

Early report that Lockerbie investigation pointing to Libya

[Pan Am 103 Clue Leads to Libyans : Terrorism: US and Scottish investigators now believe that the regime of Moammar Kadafi carried out the jet bombing that killed 270 is the headline over a lengthy report by Robin Wright and Ronald Ostrow that was published in the Los Angeles Times on this date in 1991. It reads as follows:]

The clue that turned the case was a microchip, a tiny piece of a triggering device to detonate a bomb.

From it, American and Scottish investigators found a new trail that refuted the conclusions of almost two years of arduous legwork by thousands of agents worldwide -- and eventually changed major assumptions about the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over a small Scottish village just four days before Christmas, 1988.

A key breakthrough, which came just as the largest international criminal probe in history neared an impasse, was almost a fluke. A "brilliant young CIA analyst," as one insider described him, decided to try a new hypothesis: Could someone besides the widely suspected culprits -- Palestinian radicals, their Syrian patrons or Iranian militants -- have been involved?

The analyst started with a hunch.

He searched for a "signature" that would match the Pan Am bombing with earlier incidents to prove his suspicions. Culling through CIA files, he came up with the 1984 bombing of a French UTA airliner in Chad. A premature explosion blew up the baggage compartment while the plane was still on the ground and wounded 27 people.

He also found a link with the 1986 attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Togo. Officials in Lome, the Togolese capital, had arrested nine people with two suitcases full of plastic explosives.

But the biggest find was an obscure case in Senegal involving the arrest of two men at Dakar airport in February, 1988. In their possession were 20 pounds of sophisticated Semtex plastic and TNT explosives, weapons and several triggering devices.

The analyst's hunch was right.

In all three cases, the "signature" was distinctly Libyan.

In Senegal, the two men who were arrested -- Mohammed Marzouk, alias Mohammed Naydi, and Mansour Omran Saber -- were both agents of Libyan intelligence. And the triggering devices in their possession matched the microchip fragment from the Pan Am bomb.

The connection has since provided a new set of answers to how and why Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and who masterminded the blast.

Based on the forensic breakthrough and the links with earlier cases, investigators now believe:

* The regime of Moammar Kadafi carried out the bombing. Libyan intelligence, headed by Abdullah Sanussi, orchestrated the plot.

* The primary motive was revenge for the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli in which about 40 people, including Kadafi's adopted daughter, were killed. "The notion that the 1986 bombing of Tripoli deterred Libyan terrorism is greatly flawed," a leading counterterrorism expert concluded.

* The mysterious bag carrying the bomb-laden Toshiba radio-cassette player on the blown-up Pan Am 103 came from Malta. Investigators believe the bomb was probably flown on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, Germany -- although the passenger and cargo log has disappeared. In Germany, the cassette player was loaded on Pan Am 103 as an interline bag, unattached to any passenger.

Vital missing pieces in the puzzle finally fell into place. "We followed a lot of leads that looked promising at the beginning but turned out to be nothing," a counterterrorism specialist said. "All the streets followed down to dead ends."

The breakthroughs mean that, unlike the unsolved cases of half a dozen terrorist spectaculars against US targets in the 1980s, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 may go to court.

Assistant Atty Gen Robert S Mueller III, who heads the Justice Department's Criminal Division and has been meeting frequently with the FBI on the investigation, appears poised to take the case to a grand jury, according to US officials.

Should the grand jury return sealed indictments, the biggest obstacle may not be just arresting those involved. US authorities already are working with French police now seeking to apprehend one of the Libyan suspects somewhere in North Africa, the officials said.

The problem instead may be competition over which country will get them for trial. French intelligence now believes yet another terrorist attack -- the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772 over the West African country of Niger -- was also directed by Libyan intelligence.

Although the method differed in each case, the signature was once again the telltale clue. The UTA explosive, part of which did not blow up and was retrieved from the Sahara desert, was one of five "suitcase bombs" that investigators believed Libyan intelligence purchased earlier from the notorious Mideast bomb maker Abu Ibrahim.

The primary motive, French officials suspect, was revenge for French aid that enabled Chad -- where the UTA flight took on most of its passengers -- to rout Libyan troops occupying parts of the neighboring state in 1987. The bomb was probably loaded in Brazzaville, the Congolese capital where the flight originated.

The new evidence on the Pan Am bombing, which began to emerge last summer, contradicts the longstanding belief that it was linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) headed by Ahmed Jibril. The radical PFLP-GC, based in Syria, is outside the PLO umbrella.

The original case was based on the arrest of a cell of 16 operatives in Germany two months before the 1988 Pan Am bombing. The group was found to have five sophisticated bombs, especially designed to blow up aircraft, hidden in electronic equipment.

From his base in Damascus, Jibril was also known to have worked closely with Iran, where he frequently traveled. Investigators believed that Tehran commissioned the PFLP-GC to target an American plane in retaliation for the accidental 1988 US downing of Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf in which 290 people died.

The crucial clues that changed the direction of the probe were the detonators. The Palestinian group's detonators were all Czech-made. They were attached to altimeter devices that were set to go off once a plane reached a certain altitude.

But, as forensic experts discovered, the detonator fragment that was culled from the wreckage of Flight 103, which had been scattered over 845 square miles of Scottish countryside, had important discrepancies.

It was of Swiss manufacture--from the same firm that had made the triggering devices that were found on the Libyan agents in Senegal. And it was attached to an ordinary timer that had been set to go off at a certain hour.

The "fingerprints" -- as forensic experts call the telltale characteristics of sophisticated explosive devices -- of the Pan Am bomb and the PFLP-GC bombs were vastly different. But the fingerprint of the Pan Am bomb was identical to the devices carried by the Libyan agents who were caught in Senegal.

Unfortunately, Senegal freed the Libyan agents, who were never formally charged, in June, 1988. US officials believe their release was part of a package deal in exchange for ending Libyan support for Senegal's opposition forces and for restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been severed eight years earlier.

At the time, the State Department issued a largely unnoticed -- but perhaps tragically prescient -- official comment: "We are extremely disappointed by Senegal's action, which raises questions about that country's commitment to the struggle against international terrorism."

Six months later, all 259 people on board Pan Am 103 and 11 others on the ground died when the New York-bound plane, flying 31,000 feet over Scotland, exploded just 38 minutes after takeoff from London's Heathrow Airport.

Crucial evidence held by Senegalese authorities also subsequently disappeared. US investigators have had to rely on photographs of the Libyan agents' materiel to match up the fingerprints of the two bombs.

US officials are unwilling to say where the two Libyans are today, but there are hints that they may be suspects in the Pan Am case. Investigators do believe, however, that the same top Libyan intelligence officials -- including Sanussi -- masterminded both the operation that was uncovered in Senegal and the Pan Am bombing.

Sanussi has been a constant headache to counterterrorism officials in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, a well-placed US source said. In 1986, he was sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian court to 10 years' imprisonment for conspiring to assassinate a group of prominent Libyan exiles.

Sanussi also reportedly makes regular use of Libyan Arab Airlines, the national carrier, as a cover for intelligence and terrorist activities. He is believed to have recruited baggage-handlers and airport personnel in Europe and Africa to facilitate his operations.

The new case against Libya has effectively absolved Syria, the PFLP-GC's primary sponsor, of involvement in the Pan Am bombing, counterterrorism officials say.

But neither Damascus nor Jibril has been cleared of plotting terrorist activities. US officials also believe the arrests that broke up the radical Palestinian cell operating in Germany probably foiled what could have been an even bigger terrorist spectacular: the bombing of three other planes over a period of only a few days.

Counterterrorism analysts suggest that one of the Palestinian group's targets was an Iberia Airlines flight from Madrid to Israel via Barcelona. Among its scheduled passengers were members of an Israeli sports team.

A former US intelligence official says that PFLP-GC operatives also had surveyed the Pan Am counter at Frankfurt airport, although no evidence indicated specific plans against Flight 103 as one of the three planes.

The biggest outstanding question in the investigation is what role, if any, Iran may have played, several key US sources say.

"Unlike the connection established between Iran and Jibril, we have nothing to prove Iran's link with Libya," one official said. "But some still believe there's a link (that) we haven't found yet."

Another added: "I'll go to my grave believing Iranians had a role in Pan Am 103."

By contrast, before the latest breakthrough, investigators felt they had a strong circumstantial case of Iranian links with the PFLP-GC cell on the Pan Am bombing.

Through electronic intercepts, intelligence services had monitored messages from Iranian officials known for their militancy who expressed concern after arrests of the PFLP-GC cell. They apparently were worried about the implications for an operation they wanted carried out.

Investigators initially thought the PFLP-GC and Libyan plots were directly connected. One early scenario suggested that Iran funded two separate cells for the same operation. The second cell was to provide a backup if the first one failed.

But investigators have increasingly moved away from the so-called "Cell A, Cell B" scenario.

So far, investigators have no evidence from intercepts or secret meetings of direct contact between Libya and Iran. Indeed, relations between Tripoli and Tehran have been erratic.

But if the PFLP-GC and Libyan plots were not linked, the implications are even more serious. "You have to be terrified that there were two groups out there in the fall of 1988 plotting to bomb planes," the well-placed official said. "That's even scarier."

[RB: It was just under five months later that it was announced by the prosecution authorities in Scotland and the United States that charges were being brought against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah.]

Special counsel Robert Mueller and Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from a report published late yesterday on the website of The New York Times:]

The Justice Department appointed Robert S Mueller III, a former FBI director, as special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Mr. Trump’s four-month-old presidency.

The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod J Rosenstein, came after a cascade of damaging developments for Mr. Trump in recent days, including his abrupt dismissal of the FBI director, James B Comey, and the subsequent disclosure that Mr Trump asked Mr Comey to drop the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael T Flynn. (...)

While Mr Mueller remains answerable to Mr Rosenstein — and by extension, the president — he will have greater autonomy to run an investigation than other federal prosecutors.

As a special counsel, Mr Mueller can choose whether to consult with or inform the Justice Department about his investigation. He is authorized to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” according to Mr Rosenstein’s order naming him to the post, as well as other matters that “may arise directly from the investigation.” (...)

Mr Rosenstein, who until recently was United States attorney in Maryland, took control of the investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself after acknowledging he had failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey I Kislyak, when Mr Sessions was an adviser to the Trump campaign. (...)

Mr Mueller’s appointment was hailed by Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who view him as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country. (...)

Mr. Mueller served both Democratic and Republican presidents. President Barack Obama asked him to stay two years beyond the 10-year term until he appointed Mr Comey in 2013, the only time a modern-day FBI director’s tenure has been extended.

[RB: Mr Mueller has featured regularly on this blog. Perhaps the most egregious of his ill-advised interventions in the Lockerbie case was the remarkable letter sent to Kenny MacAskill after the release of Megrahi in August 2009. The late and much lamented Ian Bell wrote a blistering article in the Sunday Herald about this letter headlined What do US cops know about justice?]

Alex Salmond 'never challenged' in US about decision to release Libyan Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Huffington Post.  It reads as follows:]

On "many trips" to the US in the years after the controversial release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond has never been challenged on the decision, one he said "most people respect even if they don’t agree with it".

The 2009 ruling by the Scottish government to release the terminally-ill al-Megrahi, who was convicted of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, received considerable push back from Washington at the time, with detractors including the former FBI director Robert Mueller and the then-Secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

However, speaking to the HuffPost on Monday, following a lecture for the opening of Glasgow Caledonian University's New York campus, Salmond insisted what his government did "was right and legitimate under Scots law".

"All of the investigations that took place… each and everyone one of them, including the Senate investigation, found nothing to suggest or establish we’d done anything other than follow the precepts of Scots law," he said.

According to the SNP leader, the "difficult decision" in 2009 was taken following the "set down procedures of the Scottish legal system".

Salmond added: "We are currently in a joint investigation with the United States authorities to pursue the leads that we’ve got, and we’ve now got the co-operation of the new Libyan authorities in taking that matter forward.

"But I don’t expect to be challenged on this [in the US], and whether people agree or disagree, there are very few people who don’t accept that we acted as we saw the right in terms of a legal system. That is an important thing for us, that bona fides are not questioned on the matter."