Spare a thought for Lockerbie

[This is the heading over a segment of the column Richard Ingrams's Week in today's edition of The Independent. It reads as follows:]

Busily castigating the US intelligence services for their failures over the bomb attempt in a plane headed for Detroit, President Obama could well spend a moment or two of his time over their record with a previous and successful act of terrorism, the Lockerbie bombing of 1988.

A BBC Newsnight report this week revived interest in the long-running Lockerbie saga when John Wyatt, an explosives expert employed by the UN, gave details of extensive tests he had conducted on a replica of the timer allegedly used to blow up the Pan Am plane. It was a fragment of such a timer that helped to convict Abdul al Megrahi of the bombing. Yet in none of Wyatt's 20 test explosions did any single identifiable fragment survive. In a lengthy email to President Obama before Christmas, Lockerbie campaigner Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the explosion, had already drawn his attention to the suspect evidence about the time given at Megrahi's trial by FBI agent Thomas Thurman who also featured in the Newsnight report.

Dr Swire also referred the President to the fact that one of the key British witnesses for the prosecution, Alan Feraday of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, had been discredited in an IRA bombing case and that the Lord Chief Justice declared his evidence to be "dogmatic in the extreme" and ruled that "he should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in this field". So who, Dr Swire asks, authorised the employment of Feraday in the Lockerbie case, and why?

[Dr Swire was interviewed on these matters this morning on the BBC Radio Scotland programme Newsweek Scotland. The interview is available on the BBC iPlayer.]

Reaction to Newsnight programme

[The following e-mail was sent by Frank Duggan to Tom Thurman and copied to Mark Hirst and me amongst others.]

Tom - that BBC video is rubbish. It must gall you to have your own experience and background deliberately misstated, but worse, to have the whole investigation continually called into question by others with unsupported theories. I would hope that there would be one reporter in the UK who would understand that the piece of timer in question, as well as other pieces of evidence, were not destroyed because the plane was not blown up! It was torn apart, and even pieces of paper that were in that suitcase were recovered. Perhaps we can remind them what happens when a pinhole is made in a balloon, and that the relatively small explosive charge created a gas shockwave penetrating the skin of the plane and blowing off the front nose portion.

Perhaps I am asking too much.

[The following e-mail was sent by Mark Hirst to Frank Duggan and copied to me.]

Tom Thurman complains [in an e-mail to Richard Marquise] that the BBC left out his other "relevant" background. Fred Whitehurst (former FBI Crime Lab Supervisor) has made it plain Thurman could not in any way describe himself as a scientist. He is certainly not qualified in the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) industry. Furthermore his comments related to PT35 confirm that the "link" was made not through scientific tests, but merely through a visual ID of the circuit board, after the most experienced explosive experts in the UK could not identify it, nor could the dozens of PCB manufacturers that police investigators visited.

As a former PCB quality assurance inspector myself (with the largest PCB manufacturer in the world) and who has spoken to a number of colleagues in the industry, there are a large number of scientific tests that could have, and should have, been carried out on PT35, but which were not. These would have given a clearer indication whether this fragment came from the timer device alleged. But as is clear in the trial transcript and below there was no actual scientific testing applied to this fragment, beyond the visual ID of a man whose professional integrity has, as is already widely known and reported, been brought into serious question in other criminal investigations. Sadly the same is true of Mr Feraday and the dubious forensic evidence he provided in other serious miscarriages of justice in the UK.

Sadly the Crown Office statement once again seems more concerned with upholding the reputation of the conviction, regardless of whether it deserves it or not - it clearly does not in this case. They are defending the indefensible, and leading the Scottish legal system further into the mire.

As a lifelong Scottish patriot, it pains me to say it but the reputation of the much vaunted independent Scottish legal system has been irredeemably damaged by this shoddy conviction, made worse by the subsequent sycophantic statements by the Crown Office to appease extreme right wing political sentiment in the US, whilst all the time one of the prime (PFLP-GC) suspects in this case sits comfortably in his home in Washington... What tragic irony.

Mr Duggan and those behind him (and I don't mean the US relatives of PA103) may take comfort in the knowledge that they are in some way reflecting and upholding the realpolitik of US global geo-political interests in persisting in the utter nonsense of this conviction, but eventually, regardless of the "appropriateness" of the forum, the full truth of this atrocity will come to light sooner or later. I would suggest, if they have not already done so, that the Crown Office press team begin drafting some preparatory lines to reflect that reality as it continues to enter the public domain, if we have any hope of salvaging the reputation of Scots law. I fear however it may be too late.

Patrick Haseldine's references

[Patrick Haseldine has recently posted a lengthy comment, with supporting references, on the Newsnight segment broadcast after all thread. Unfortunately, the hypertext links do not work. Here they are:]

References
A. UN Council for Namibia enacts Decree No 1 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/4186138) and UNCN plans enforcement action. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1309/is_v22/ai_3752724/?tag=content;col1) (Also see "Council for Namibia sues Netherlands over Namibia's natural resources" article, which follows.)

B. History of Namibia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Namibia#Negotiations_and_transition)

C. Michael McGowan's invitation to Bernt Carlsson. (http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/opinion/Michael-McGowan-The-best-tribute.5612963.jp)

D. "Finger of suspicion", The Guardian, 7 December 1989. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PatrickHaseldine3B.jpg)

E. Jan-Olof Bengtsson, iDAG, 12 March 1990. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_talk:IDAG(1)12MAR90.jpg)

F. Reuters report, 12 November 1994. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_talk:REUTERS12NOV94.jpg)

G. "The Lockerbie Incident : A Detective's Tale", by John Crawford, 2002 (pages 88/89). http://books.google.com/books?id=Nh9_p8RjikQC&pg=PP1&dq=Lockerbie+Incident:+A+Detective%27s+Tale#v=onepage&q=&f=false

H. Former MEP calls for urgent inquiry by the United Nations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernt_Carlsson#Call_for_urgent_inquiry)

Extract from The Gulliver Rossing Uranium Ltd Dossier:

Exploitation of Namibian uranium has had a "disastrous impact" on British foreign policy, and the relationship between Britain and many Third World countries. (A visit to the mine paid by the country's prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in early 1989, where she commented that the project made her "proud to be British" can only have deepened this sense of disillusionment and mistrust among Third World peoples). Moreover - and whether or not the mine's output has ever directly fed South Africa's nuclear plants - Rossing has certainly buttressed the apartheid state.
(http://www.sea-us.org.au/gulliver/rossing.html)

Council for Namibia sues Netherlands over Namibia's natural resources
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Council+for+Namibia+sues+Netherlands+over+Namibia's+natural...-a06272039

Patrick Haseldine's online petition http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BerntCarlsson/ which demands a United Nations inquiry into the murder of UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

Crown Office swipes at BBC over Lockerbie claims, but dodges key explosives issue

[This is the headline over a report on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. It reads in part:]

The Crown Office have released a statement criticising the BBC after it broadcast an investigation on Newsnight across England and Wales reporting that the UN's European consultant on explosives, John Wyatt, found that the circuit board “evidence” relied upon in the discredited Crown case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi could not have survived a semtex explosion as claimed in the trial. (...)

The Crown statement repeats the fact that Megrahi was convicted of the Lockerbie atrocity, but omits the later development that the conviction was thereafter under appeal before being dropped to facilitate Megrahi's return to Libya, following the finding of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission that a miscarriage of justice may have occured.

The statement also highlighted what it described as “errors” in the BBC report and lists details regarding a series of test explosions undertaken as part of the Lockerbie proceedings. However the statement does not address Wyatt’s central claim about the ability of a fragment of circuit board to survive a semtex explosion.

[The full report, including the complete text of the Crown Office statement, can be read here.]

Lockerbie-Malta link blasted away

[This is the headline over a report in today's edition of the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reads in part:]

A piece of circuit board thought to have formed part of the bomb that blew up the Pan-Am aircraft over Lockerbie and which supported the thesis that linked Malta to the tragedy is unlikely to have survived the explosion, according to fresh tests by a British bomb expert.

The expert, a UN European consultant on explosives, John Wyatt, recreated the explosion 20 times, using a similar circuit board and timer and the parts were pulverised every time.

Talking to The Times yesterday, he said every test left absolutely no fragments like the one found at Lockerbie and which was used to implicate Libya and Malta in the whole affair. (...)

"It was highly improbable to the point of making it unlikely" that such a fragment could have survived the blast, Dr Wyatt said. (...)

"We conducted 20 tests, 19 of which were indoors to make sure we could collect all the evidence. We even painted the circuit board bright yellow to make it easier to identify any fragments among the debris. In no circumstance did we find any fragment," Dr Wyatt explained.

The explosive tests were conducted in stages and in a controlled environment, which would have made it very easy to collect all the evidence.

"We tried exploding the device on its own; in a radio similar to the one it was supposed to have been planted in; in a suitcase with and without clothes; surrounded by other suitcases and, eventually, in a container. In all tests, the timer and the circuit board were completely destroyed," Dr Wyatt said.

The fragment found in Lockerbie had not been in ideal forensic conditions, he added, because the explosion happened at a height of 10,000 feet and the debris fell over a large area in the Scottish wilderness. "This increases the improbability of finding a fragment that was part of the bomb itself," he said.

Dr Wyatt, who has more than 25 years experience in the British army, mostly as a bomb disposal officer, conducted the tests for BBC's current affairs programme, Newsnight (...)

When asked by The Times, the expert would not say whether his analysis would lead him to suggest the fragment could have been put there after the explosion. "That is not for me to say but it was very, very improbable for such a fragment to be found," he said.

The fragment was found three weeks after the attack. For months it remained unnoticed and unremarked but, eventually, it was to shape the entire investigation. The fragment was embedded in a charred piece of clothing, which was marked with a label saying it was made in Malta.

The Malta lead raised the question as to who would have bought the clothes.

The investigation zoomed in on the Sliema outlet Mary's House and shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who was the other key element in the prosecution's case, identified Mr al-Megrahi.

However, serious doubts were cast on Mr Gauci's testimony because the identification of Mr al-Megrahi only came years later after the witness had seen him pictured in a magazine as a Lockerbie suspect. (...)

This led several people, including Scottish relatives of people who died in the atrocity, to call for a fresh inquiry.

The call was never taken up, not even by the Maltese government, which, many believe, should lead the fight to clear Malta's name from the bombing implication.

Version available outside the UK

I am grateful to a reader of the blog for informing me that the Newsnight segment is available to non-UK residents on the BBC News website and can be accessed here.

Newsnight segment broadcast after all

The Lockerbie segment was broadcast on Newsnight on Wednesday evening after all. I have just watched it on the Newsnight website. The programme concentrates on the famous fragment of circuit board that supposedly came from a MST-13 timer, supplied by MEBO principally to Libya.

The programme mentions the concerns that often have been expressed about the provenance of the fragment, about its identification, about the forensic scientific processes to which it was (or was not) subjected and about deficiencies in the record keeping relating to it. But by far the most important revelation in the programme is the evidence of experiments conducted by top explosives expert, Dr John Wyatt. In twenty controlled explosions of suitcases packed as the Lockerbie one was alleged to have been, no such fragment of timer circuit board ever survived. According to Dr Wyatt, the contention that such a fragment survived the Pan Am 103 explosion at 31,000 feet is simply "unbelievable".

Newsnight Lockerbie segment postponed

I understand that the Newsnight report on the Lockerbie evidence, which was due to be broadcast tonight, has been postponed because of a breaking political story in the UK. It will probably be broadcast on Friday, 8th January).

'Flaws' in key Lockerbie evidence

An investigation by BBC's Newsnight has cast doubts on the key piece of evidence which convicted the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Tests aimed at reproducing the blast appear to undermine the case's central forensic link, based on a tiny fragment identified as part of a bomb timer.

The tests suggest the fragment, which linked the attack to Megrahi, would not have survived the mid-air explosion. (...)

Newsnight has been reviewing that evidence, and has exposed serious doubts about the forensics used to identify the fragment as being part of a trigger circuit board.

The fragment was found three weeks after the attack. For months it remained unnoticed and unremarked, but eventually it was to shape the entire investigation.

The fragment was embedded in a charred piece of clothing, which was marked with a label saying it was made in Malta. (...)

Newsnight has discovered that the fragment - crucial to the conviction - was never subjected to chemical analysis or swabbing to establish whether it had in fact been involved in any explosion.

And the UN's European consultant on explosives, John Wyatt, has told Newsnight that there are further doubts over the whether the fragment could have come from the trigger of the Lockerbie bomb.

He has recreated the suitcase bomb which it is said destroyed Pan Am 103, using the type of radio in which the explosive and the timer circuit board were supposedly placed, and the same kind of clothes on which the fragment was found.

In each test the timer and its circuit board were obliterated, prompting Mr Wyatt to question whether such a fragment could have survived the mid-air explosion.

He told Newsnight: "I do find it quite extraordinary and I think highly improbable and most unlikely that you would find a fragment like that - it is unbelievable.

"We carried out 20 tests, we didn't carry out 100 or 1,000, but in those 20 tests we found absolutely nothing at all - so I found it highly improbable that you would find anything like that, particularly at 10,000 feet when bits are dropping into long wet grass over hundreds of miles."

Watch Peter Marshall's full report on the Lockerbie bomb evidence on Newsnight at 2230 GMT on BBC Two, then afterwards on the Newsnight website.

[From a report on the BBC News website.

I am informed by a reader that it is likely that people not based in the UK will be unable to watch the video on the Newsnight website unless they are operating through a UK-based proxy server.]

We were right to complain about Lockerbie prisoner pact, says SNP

[This is the headline over an article in today's issue of The Times. It refers to the report in yesterday's issue of The Observer that forms the subject-matter of the blog post that can be read here. The article in The Times reads in part:]

The Scottish government claimed last night it had been fully justified in protesting that Tony Blair’s Government had kept it in the dark about a prisoner transfer agreement negotiated between the UK and Libya.

Its comments came after the publication of e-mails in a Sunday newspaper which revealed that the Government at Westminster had tried to secure the backing of the Scottish government for the deal — which allowed for the release of the Lockerbie bomber — weeks after it had agreed to it in principle in 2007.

The disclosure of the prisoner transfer agreement led to furious exchanges between the UK Government and Alex Salmond’s Scottish Administration, with the Scots saying that they had not been consulted. While the Blair Government responded by saying that the agreement did not specifically refer to Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in Greenock jail at the time, Mr Salmond pointed out that he was the only Libyan prisoner held in the UK.

A Scottish government spokesman said last night: “This confirms everything that the Scottish government said at the time about how UK ministers kept Scotland in the dark about the prisoner transfer agreement [PTA] process being negotiated by Tony Blair with Libya.

“When we did find out about it, UK ministers at first agreed to our request to have anyone involved in the Lockerbie atrocity excluded from the PTA, but they then reneged on that.”

The e-mails exchanged between both sides in the dispute show civil servants in Whitehall sought to convene a meeting with their Scottish justice counterparts “to establish the UK’s negotiating position” only at the end of June 2007 or the beginning of July 2007. This was more than a month after Mr Blair signed a memorandum of understanding with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in which both sides agreed to a binding deal to exchange prisoners.

The e-mails can be seen as bolstering claims that the Blair Government was keen to sign the agreement, which has since being linked with wider deals covering arms exports and oil.

In the same month the memorandum was signed, BP agreed a billion-dollar oil deal with Libya, and Britain agreed to sell the former pariah Libyan state water cannons. (...)

The e-mails will serve to reinforce suspicions that the UK Government was willing to ride roughshod over Scottish sensitivities when it came to the Lockerbie bomber.

In an emergency statement at Holyrood at the time, Mr Salmond expressed his fury that the understanding signed between Blair and the Libyans did not specifically exclude al-Megrahi. Over the next few months, Mr Salmond made several requests for al-Megrahi to be excluded from the agreement. In December 2007, Jack Straw finally wrote to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, to say that he had been unable to secure such an exclusion and that time had run out.

In the event, the prisoner transfer agreement was not used in the case of al-Megrahi. To the undisguised fury of American relatives of the 270 Lockerbie victims, he was released on the ground of compassion by Mr MacAskill in August last year. The reason for his release was that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and he had only about three months to live. (...)

Who released al-Megrahi?

[This is the heading over a post on the Hythlodæus blog. It refers to a report which is said to appear in today's edition of The Observer. As the post itself states, the report is not to be found on the newspaper's website. The post reads in part:]

It may be many years before the whole story behind the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the alleged Lockerbie bomber, is told. However, there are regular snippets being released under freedom of information requests.

The latest such releases seem to have been picked up by The Observer in Scotland alone, not even deemed important enough to be published online alongside the rest of the Observer’s content. In a short article, the little-read left-wing paper reveals that, as was widely speculated, the move to release al-Megrahi began more then two years before Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill announced the actual release.

The new timeline of events as presented in today’s article is as follows:

May 2007
*SNP Government elected to Holyrood.
*Tony Blair signs a Memorandum of Understanding with Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. This Memorandum was a standard text, allowing for the exchange of all prisoners and remains legally binding upon both the UK and Libya.

June/July 2007
*BP, the British-owned oil giant, sign a multi-million dollar deal to exploit oil resources in Libya.
*The British Government signs an agreement to supply Libya, a dictatorship, with water cannons. Rumours persist regarding sales of additional lethal and non-lethal arms to Libya.
*Tony Blair stands down as Prime Minister.
*Whitehall-based Civil Servants contact their Scottish counterparts in order to fix the UK’s “negotiating position” on the already signed Memorandum of Understanding.

June-December 2007
*The SNP Government lobby various Westminster figures, including Lord Falconer, to add a clause to the Memorandum of Understanding excluding al-Megrahi from prisoner exchange deals.

December 2007
*Jack Straw, at that time Home Secetary, writes to Kenny MacAskill stating that the UK Government is unable to secure a deal on al-Megrahi and that time has run out as far as negotiating is concerned.

August 2009
*Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi released and repatriated to Libya.
*Kenny MacAskill faces censure by the Scottish Parliament for his decision to release al-Megrahi but maintains that the decision to release him was his alone.
*The Scottish Government is heavily criticised by the US Government and various British political figures. The British Government, beset by it’s own problems, maintain their support for the decision.

Despite what Kenny MacAskill maintains, it does appear that the decision to release al-Megrahi was out of his hands. By signing a treaty which legally bound the Scottish Government to release Libyan prisoners, the Westminster administration over-ruled the devolution settlement undermining the sovereignty of the Scottish Government and the democratic will of the Scottish People in order to appease a dictatorship. (...)

Relatives of Lockerbie victims begin new legal fight for public inquiry

[This is the headline over a report recently published on the Telegraph website. It reads in part:]

UK Families Flight 103, the relatives' campaign group, will use human rights laws in a bid to uncover the truth about the terrorist attack, which claimed 270 lives in December 1988.

The group has hired Gareth Peirce, the prominent human rights solicitor better known for her work representing terror suspects, to devise a legal strategy to secure the inquiry for which families have long campaigned.

It is the first time the families have formally hired lawyers to pursue an inquiry.

The development comes after Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, rejected the group's latest demands for an independent review of the bombing. He informed them of his decision in a letter, dated Christmas Eve, which was received by the relatives last week.

In the letter, Mr Brown said: "All of the matters which you have raised in support of the case for an inquiry are points which were raised at the original trial or the appeal in Scotland, and I do not see that it would be in the public interest to air them again at an inquiry." (...)

Pamela Dix, whose brother Peter was killed in the atrocity, said: "We are arguing that our human rights have been transgressed by the failure to hold an inquiry.

"This is the first time we have hired lawyers to do this. We have until now relied on appealing to the good sense and good nature of our politicians, and that has been to no avail."

The Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga, 19, was among the victims when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, said: "I feel extremely positive about this development. For 21 years we have been asking the same questions and asking for an inquiry but I think we are nearer to getting it than we have ever been."

Legal tactics used by UK Families Flight 103 are likely to focus on Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, enshrined in British law by the Human Rights Act, which details the right to life.

Previous legal cases have shown that any failure by the state to properly investigate a suspected murder may amount to a breach of the right to life of the victim.

Options open to the families include launching a judicial review of the Government's decision to refuse an inquiry, or using human rights laws to overturn Megrahi's conviction so that ministers are forced to act.

Dr Jim Swire, whose 24-year-old daughter Flora died on the flight, said it was crucial to overturn Megrahi's guilty verdict so that "public outrage" left the Prime Minister with no choice but to allow in independent inquiry into the bombing.

Jean Berkley, who lost her 29-year-old son Alistair, said Mr Brown's letter "was not a well-considered reply" and added: "This is a kind of treatment we are used to receiving. Our perfectly-well thought out points were dismissed in a rather thoughtless way."

[The Prime Minister's letter, dated 24 December 2009, is in reply to the letter delivered by the UK relatives on 27 October 2009. It reads as follows:]

Thank you for your letter of 27 October.

As I said in my letter of 23 October, I am deeply aware of the pain and suffering caused to you and the other families of the Lockerbie bombing victims. You continue to have my deepest sympathies for your loss.

You referred in your previous letters to the need for a public inquiry into the investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and in your letter of 27 October you again referred to the Heathrow incident. As I said in my last letter, the Heathrow incident to which you refer was examined by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Scotland, which concluded that it did not render the conviction of Mr Megrahi unsafe.

All of the matters which you have raised in support of the case for an inquiry are points which were raised at the original trial or the appeal in Scotland, and I do not see that it would be in the public interest to air them again at an inquiry.

I do appreciate that this answer is still not what you were looking for. Please be assured that my thoughts, and those of the Government, remain with you and the other families, especially at what must be a particularly difficult time of year for you all.

Reaction to "Gadhafi admitted it!"

[The following comment on the "Gadhafi admitted it!" thread comes from Peter Biddulph. It was too long to be posted directly as a comment on that thread.]

The timing of this information is most strange.

According to Wikipaedia and other sources, Arnaud de Borchgrave appears to have an impeccable background. According to him, the CIA debriefing arranged by Woolsey took place in 1993.

But I am informed by an expert on these matters that Gaddafi never, repeat never, was without at least one armed personal bodyguard. To be alone with an American journalist with many contacts in Washington would be, for Gaddafi, impossible.

And if this information was known in 1993, why on earth did the CIA, the FBI and the Scottish Crown office not know of it in the next seven years leading up to the trial?

Why was de Borchgrave not invited to be deposed or give evidence to the Lockerbie trial, or even an affidavit?

It might be said to be hearsay, and therefore not admissable in court.

But several hearsay issues and affidavits were extensively investigated by the court, notably the Goben Memorandum, and the account of the interview of bomb maker Marwan Khreesat by FBI Agent Edward Marshman. Even a hearsay account that Gaddafi confessed to the crime would have cast serious doubt on al-Megrahi's defence.

The original 1991 indictment could have been varied to reflect the latest knowledge. Indeed, the final version of the indictment was agreed by the US Department of Justice and the Scottish Crown Office in 2000, only three weeks before the trial commenced.

If the FBI did know it, why did they not mention any of this in a May 1995 Channel 4 discussion following the screening of the documentary The Maltese Double Cross? Buck Revell of the FBI became quite intense in answering Jim Swire's questions and those of presenter Sheena McDonald. But he said not a word about the Gaddafi "confession". Why?

Also, how come Marquise - as he says himself "Chief FBI Investigator of the Lockerbie bombing" - was not aware of it in the seven years leading up to the 2000 trial or the nine years since? That is, sixteen years of ignorance?

And why did CIA Vincent Cannistraro himself not mention it when interviewed on camera on at least two occasions in 1994 by Alan Francovich for the documentary film The Maltese Double Cross?

As head of the CIA team investigating Libya, Cannistraro would be the first to be briefed by the Langley central office. He was happy to provide hearsay evidence to the media and film camera against Oliver North and any Libyan or Iranian that got in his way. He spoke at length about green and brown timer boards, and potential witnesses.

To relate on camera the Gaddafi "confession" would have been greatly to Cannistraro's advantage, a slam-dunk in the public mind. Indeed, even a hint in the media would have ham-strung al-Megrahis defence before proceedings commenced.

But between 1993 and 2009 from Cannistraro not a word. And when it comes to America's interests, the CIA never follow Queensberry rules.

CIA Robert Baer too, as a Middle Eastern specialist has given no hint of this. Such information would surely have come within the "need to know" category. Yet he has maintained on two occasions that Iran commissioned the job and paid the PFLP-GC handsomely two days after the attack. His conclusion suggests strongly that the so-called fragment of the bomb was planted.

The real reasons for this late announcement, we believe, are as follows:

1. It is well known among those who study these things in the field that there are two candidates shortly to succeed Gaddafi. His son Saif, and his son-in law Sennusi. Meanwhile Sennusi is not top of the pops with Arab leaders in the region. They would love it if he were out of the frame. The Borchgrave revelation discredits Sennusi perfectly.

2. The SCCRC is shortly to publish information which some believe will cause serious embarrassment to the FBI And CIA. The Borchgrave email is huge smoke and mirrors, a spoiler.

It all looks highly suspicious. Just another carefully crafted phase in a long, long history of disinformation.

Special relationship ‘unharmed’

The decision to free the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing will not cause any long-term damage to the so-called UK-US “special relationship”, the American ambassador to London has insisted.

Louis Susman, 71, a former banker from Chicago and one of Barack Obama’s key backers during the presidential campaign, said the special relationship was like a marriage in which there were disagreements.

He said: “This was a spat, a case where friends can disagree. Do I think it has diminished the relationship on a long-term basis? Absolutely not.”

Mr Susman dismissed threats of a boycott of British goods in wake of the decision by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, adding: “I will continue to drink Scotch whisky, I love Scottish golf courses and we buy Scottish sweaters.”

[From a report on the heraldscotland website.]

Gadhafi admitted it!

This is the subject-heading of an e-mail sent by Arnaud de Borchgrave to Frank Duggan and copied by the latter to me. It reads as follows: "As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya." 

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, Gaddafi made the admission, off the record, in the course of an interview in 1993. His published account reads: 

"Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. After a long interview with Gaddafi in 1993, this editor at large of The Washington Times asked Libya's supreme leader to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988, and for which Libya paid $2.7 billion in reparations. He dismissed all the aides in his tent (located that evening in the desert about 100 kilometers south of Tripoli) and began in halting English without benefit of an interpreter, as was the case in the on-the-record part of the interview. 

"Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655, on a 28-minute daily hop from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz to the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of the Gulf, was shot down by a guided missile from the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes. The Vincennes radar mistook it for an F-14 Tomcat fighter (which Iran still flies); 290 were killed, including 66 children. A year before, in 1987, the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi Mirage, killing 37 sailors. The Vincennes skipper, Capt. William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit, and the entire crew was awarded combat-action ribbons. The United States paid compensation of $61.8 million to the families of those killed on IR 655. 

"Gaddafi told me, 'The most powerful navy in the world does not make such mistakes. Nobody in our part of the world believed it was an error.' And retaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). 'Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?' said Gaddafi. 'We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was,' Gaddafi added. "As he got up to take his leave, he said, 'Please tell the CIA that I wish to cooperate with America. I am just as much threatened by Islamist extremists as you are.' 

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history." 

On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.