"Food is not important, freedom and innocence are"

[The following are translated excerpts from an article that appeared on this date in 2008 in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi:]

On February 27, a Scottish court is expected to re-examine the Lockerbie case and hear the appeal submitted by Abd-al-Basit al-Miqrahi, the Libyan national convicted of involvement in the bombing of a Pan Am airliner over this Scottish district. Al-Miqrahi has been serving a life sentence in a prison in Glasgow - the largest city in Scotland - since being convicted of the bombing by an international court that was set up in the Netherlands.

Many observers believe that Al-Miqrahi could soon leave prison and return to Libya now that Britain and Libya have signed an extradition treaty by which he would serve the rest of his sentence in his country. [RB: What is being referred to is the UK-Libya prisoner transfer agreement.] This is a known practice between countries (...).

Al-Quds al-Arabi visited Al-Miqrahi in his Scottish prison, located 40 kilometres from Glasgow. Entry procedures to the prison were normal and the guards were extremely gentle - we were not even physically searched. We were accompanied by Abd-al-Rahman al-Suwaysi, Libyan general consul in Scotland, and Algerian attorney Sa'd Jabbar. Al-Miqrahi entered the visitation room wearing a thick wool hat, jeans trousers, and a wool jersey, and he had clearly gained weight due to lack of activity.

The words Al-Miqrahi kept repeating all the time were: ‘I did not receive a fair trial’ and that ‘several documents were withheld from the court.’ He laid out on the counter a file filled with paragraphs that had been suppressed, rather, entire pages had been blackened out to conceal information from the judge under the pretext of security considerations.

Anyone visiting Al-Miqrahi will note his extremely high spirits, his unusual sturdiness, and his strong belief in his innocence of all the charges he was convicted of. He would smile every now an then, especially when talking about the letters he had received from Scots who wished him happy holidays, believed in his innocence, and expressed solidarity with him. Al-Miqrahi said: ‘A victim's family wrote to me, saying that on behalf of the citizens of Scotland, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.’

I asked Al-Miqrahi: ‘What about the Arabs?’ He replied sadly: ‘I have not received a single letter from an Arab, but I have received 27 letters from Scots …’

He went on to say that Dr Swire, doyen of the families of the victims, visited him in prison, as did Reverend John Reef [sic; probably means Rev John Mosey, father of one of the victims] and a number of other people, not to mention the Libyan consul, who visits him on a regular basis. Al-Miqrahi follows events in the Arab world through the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya channels, which he has been allowed to watch in his small cell, measuring no more than 2 by 1.5 meters. One day, a Scottish inmate visited him as he watched Opposite Direction in which the argument was in full swing; the inmate asked if he could understand what was being said, to which Al-Miqrahi said: ‘I can if you can.’

Al-Miqrahi said that what touched him the most was the martyrdom of child Muhammad al-Durah and his father's desperate attempts to protect him, and added that the image of Muhammad and his father never leaves him. Asked about his own children, he said that what pains him the most is that the Scottish Government refused to let them reside near his prison. He went on to say that he longs for them, and that he is especially saddened when his young son asks: ‘When are you coming back, Dad? You promised us many times that you would return soon.’

He spoke affectionately and admiringly of South African leader Nelson Mandela, who had visited him in prison, saying that Mandela refused to be accompanied by any British official when he visited him in his prison in Scotland. He added that Mandela also called him when he was visiting the Netherlands because his Dutch hosts had told him that he cannot visit him in prison as it would be a breach of protocol. Al-Miqrahi said that he wrote to many Arab leaders telling them that he wants a free trial, but that none of them replied, not even to humour him.

We asked Consul Abd-al-Rahman if he would remain in his post if Al-Miqrahi is transferred to Libya as expected, to which he said that he would not stay a single day because the consulate was originally opened in order to care for Al-Miqrahi and provide him with all means of comfort. For his part, attorney Sa'd Jabbar, who sat in on the visit, said that the Libyan Government exerted immense pressures on the British Government to retry or deport Al-Miqrahi - pressures that included a suspension of trade agreements. He expected Al-Miqrahi to return very soon.

Al-Miqrahi said that he would return to Libya because he misses his homeland and family, but that he wants to return an innocent man, not a convicted one, adding that he is confident that any free trial would exonerate him of the charges brought against him. His eyes filled with tears of anguish. Asked about food and whether he misses Bazin, Mabkakah, Isban, and Kuskusi, and he said: ‘I miss a lot of these foods even though the consulate supplied me with daily meals throughout the month of Ramadan, but food is not important, freedom and innocence, however, are.’

Saudi Arabia/South Africa Lockerbie mediation attempt blocked

[What follows is a report published on Bloomberg News on this date in 1999:]

Saudi, South Africa Blocked From Mediating in Libya Standoff

A Security Council panel turned down a request by Saudi Arabian and South African diplomats to travel to Libya in an effort to break the stalemate over sanctions against the country, Slovenian diplomat Janez Lenarcic said.

“There was no consensus in the committee to approve the request,” Lenarcic said. He would not identify which committee member or members opposed the request. [RB: My sources at the time told me that the opponents were the United States and the United Kingdom.] Slovenia is a non-permanent member of the 15-nation Security Council and its ambassador, Danilo Turk, heads the council's sanctions committee.

Libya has been under United Nations sanctions restricting travel and arms sales since April 1992 because of its refusal to hand over two Libyans accused of blowing up a Pam-Am airliner ten years ago over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. The crash killed 270 people, including [11] on the ground.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently on an official visit to South Africa where he's expected to ask South African President Nelson Mandela to urge Libya to accept a US-British plan to try the two suspects in the Netherlands under Scottish law.

Last week US President Bill Clinton said he'll seek to tighten international sanctions against Libya unless it agrees to a trial for the two in the Netherlands by February.

The request for permission to travel to Libya was made by Saudi Arabia's Washington ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, on behalf of the Saudi kingdom.

“As a follow-up to the conversations with the (UN) secretary-general regarding the Lockerbie situation, I'm kindly requesting the permission of the sanctions committee to travel directly to Tripoli and Sirte,'' Prince Bandar wrote in his letter to committee chairman Turk.

He was referring to secretary-general Kofi Annan who last month made a personal appeal to Libyan leader Muammar Al Qaddafi to move forward on the Lockerbie issue which the US and Britain wanted to have settled by Dec 21 last year, the tenth anniversary of the bombing.

Prince Bandar said during the visit he would represent Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz. [RB: Abdullah succeeded to the throne in 2005.] Accompanying him would be South Africa's Jakes Gerwel, the director-general in the office of the president, representing Mandela.

The request was made during the new year's holiday. Had it been granted, Prince Bandar and Gerwel along with a staff of 15, would have arrived in Tripoli today, according to the letter, and would have stayed for two days.

Another chapter in Lockerbie story

[This is the heading over a letter by Joan S Laverie in today’s edition of the Sunday Herald. It reads as follows:]

The Lord Advocate's latest ­ruminations on the Lockerbie ­tragedy produce neither heat nor light (Scotland's top law officer: Megrahi WAS guilty of Lockerbie atrocity, and The four elephants in the room which suggest the Lord Advocate is wrong, News, December 21). His continuing faith in the verdict at Camp Zeist, under Scots law, is of no consequence. The fact remains that a trial without a jury is never a good idea, and even if one is present, with alleged ­perpetrators of acts of terrorism in the dock, justice often plays second fiddle to political expediency.

Frank Mulholland promises us, nevertheless, that "justice has no sell-by date in Scotland". His attempt earlier this year to arrange an interview between the Scottish police and Abdullah al-Senussi, long-serving Libyan intelligence chief and brother-in-law of Colonel Gaddafi, shows reasonable intent. Al-Senussi is also a possible Lockerbie suspect, and is currently in custody in Tripoli awaiting trial for the murder and torture of Libyan citizens.

Mulholland will make many enemies both at home and abroad, if his determination to secure justice for the families of the dead is indeed genuine. In doing so, he will most certainly have to jettison any understandable concern for the reputation of the Scottish justice system and, especially, its presumed independence. I wish him well.

Piece by piece, the major elements of the case are falling apart

The following is an item originally posted on this blog six years ago on this date:

[What follows is excerpted from a long op-ed entitled "20 Years Later, the Lockerbie Terror Attack Is Not as Solved as We Think" on the website of US News & World Report by Nathan Thrall, a well-known American writer on US politics and Middle East affairs. The full article can be read here.]

But though a chapter may have closed, the Lockerbie case is today further from resolution than it has been since the investigation began 20 years ago.

An official Scottish review body has declared that a "miscarriage of justice may have occurred" in the conviction of the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The reviewers examined a secret document, provided to the United Kingdom by a foreign government and seen during Megrahi's trial by only the prosecution, that they said cast serious doubts on Megrahi's guilt. A new appeal of Megrahi's conviction is scheduled for this coming spring. The UN special observer appointed by Kofi Annan to Megrahi's trial, Hans Koechler, has declared that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted, as have the legal architect of his special trial, Prof Robert Black, and a spokesperson for the families of the British victims, Jim Swire.

Piece by piece, the major elements of the prosecution's case are falling apart. A high-ranking Scottish police officer has said vital evidence was fabricated. One of the FBI's principal forensic experts has been discredited. The lord advocate—Scotland's chief legal officer—who initiated the Lockerbie prosecution has called the credibility of the government's primary witness into question, stating that the man was "not quite the full shilling...an apple short of a picnic." Another prosecution witness now claims, in a July 2007 sworn affidavit, to have lied about the key piece of evidence linking Libya to the bombing.So if the case against Megrahi and his government is so thin, why would Libya pay compensation to the families of Lockerbie's victims?

One answer came from Libya's prime minister. He told the BBC that his government took no responsibility for Lockerbie and had merely "bought peace," agreeing to pay compensation to the families of victims because it was the only means of ending the far more costly sanctions against his country. Saif al-Qadhafi, the Libyan leader's son and one of the regime's most prominent spokespersons, recently told CNN that Megrahi "had nothing to do with Lockerbie." When asked why his government would pay the victims of a terrorist act in which they played no role, Qadhafi responded, "There was no other way around. Because there was a resolution from the Security Council, and you have to do it. Otherwise, you will not get rid of the sanctions. It was very political. Very political."

Megrahi has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and may not live to see his second appeal. If he does live and his appeal succeeds, a new and independent international investigation — as has been called for by the UN observer to the Lockerbie trial — may commence. If it does, the investigators will return to the primary suspect of the first year and a half of the original investigation: a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, whose bank account, according to a CIA officer involved in the investigation, received a transfer of $11 million two days after Lockerbie and whose leaders the investigators believed had been contracted by Iran to avenge America's inadvertent shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew.

Yet the more likely outcome is that Megrahi will die just before or after his second appeal and that with the closure of his death, like that of Libya's payments, most will forget that the Lockerbie case remains unsolved.

[On this blog, I headed the item “US media beginning to see the light”. One swallow does not a summer make.]

Delay in securing a Lockerbie trial

[What follows is a Reuters news agency report from 2 January 1999:]

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview published on Sunday he would appeal to South African President Nelson Mandela to persuade Libya to hand over two men suspected of the Lockerbie bombing for trial in the Netherlands. Blair, who starts a four day visit to South Africa on Tuesday, said negotiations between Britain, the United States and Libya over the 1980 airline bombing had reached an impasse.

In the interview with the Sunday Business newspaper, he said Mandela had already played a “unique and important” role in trying to resolve the controversy and he would ask the South African leader to intervene again. “I will explain that we have done all that we reasonably can to resolve the impasse over the trial. The UK-US initiative for a trial in the Netherlands has been on the table for four months,” said Blair.

“The UK-US initiative for a trial in the Netherlands has been on the table for four months. I do not for one moment accept that Scottish courts would not give a fair trial, but was prepared to go for a third-country trial because this is what the Libyan Government said it wanted. I will appeal to President Mandela to convince the Libyan government that a third country trial should now proceed,” he added.

[Mr Blair conveniently fails to mention that while four months had passed since the announcement of the UK/US scheme, four years and seven months passed after the Libyan Government and defence team accepted my “neutral venue” proposal before the UK and US published their own amended (and inferior) version. After January 1994 the delay in achieving a Lockerbie trial was attributable almost exclusively to the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States. The history is outlined here.

Nelson Mandela’s rÔle in the resolution of the Lockerbie impasse can be followed here.]

The truth about Lockerbie still unknown

This is the translated headline over a long and detailed article by Tereza Spencerova published on 21 December 2014 on the Czech Literární Noviny website, which has just come to my attention. Google Translate provides a reasonably good English version of the article.

Say not the struggle nought availeth

[I wish all readers of this blog a happy and peaceful New Year. 

The following are three stanzas from A H Clough’s poem Say not the struggle nought availeth:]

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

 The labour and the wounds are vain,

 The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been they remain.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

 Far back through creeks and inlets making,

Came, silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

 In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.

"Accepting responsibility" contrasted with admitting guilt

[What follows is an article published on this date in 2009 on Adam Larson (Caustic Logic)’s blog The 12/7-9/11 Treadmill and Beyond (and referred to on this blog here):] 

I recently started an interesting discussion thread at the JREF forum, fishing for thoughts on why people believe the official line on the Lockerbie bombing so fervently. I hadn't yet encountered any serious questions in the course of previous brilliant and provocative discussions - just a few drive-by statements supporting Megrahi's and Col Gaddafy's absolute guilt, but never accompanied by evidence of any real knowledge. Among the questions and counter-points I suggested people could offer, if they knew anything, was "Libya admitted responsibility and paid out billions of dollars!" And if they had asked, I would answer like this: 

There is no doubt that the Libyan government did issue a statement admitting responsibility, and agreed to pay compensation, among other measures, in 2003. It was an explicit pre-condition, inssted by Washington, to having broad UN sanctions lifted. Tripoli has always defended its innocence of Lockerbie, but to function in the global economy, they had to do something. Here they managed to not explicitly break the rule, and using careful (cynical?) wordplay, managed to accept responsibility without admitting guilt. Sanctions were lifted. 

There’s been much oxymoronic harping on this in the West as both an admission of guilt and an arrogant refusal to admit their guilt. The BBC’s 2008 Conspiracy Files episode on Lockerbie is a brilliant example. “For those that believe al Megrahi was framed,” snarls the narrator, Carolyn Katz, “one fact remains hard to explain away. Libya agreed to award substantial compensation for Lockerbie. Sanctions were then lifted.” Well, ignoring that they just answered their own stumper of a question, it’s a good question, and they continue: “Tripoli accepted responsibility for what it called ‘the Lockerbie incident.’ But does it admit guilt?” Of course not, and by pretending there’s some disconnect, they’ve primed the audience to see the darkest of cynicism at work. Oops, how did that happen?

Under Prolonged Duress

Following he indictment of Libyan agents al Megrahi and Fhimah in late 1991, a process itself twisted with political machinations and riddled with a million broken questions marks, the Security Council moved to enforce the official truth with sanctions. Resolution 748 of 31 March 1992 imposed an arms and air embargo, diplomatic restrictions, and establishment of a sanctions committee. The committee’s work led to Resolution 883 of 11 November 1993, toughening sanctions. This measure “approved the freezing of Libyan funds and financial resources in other countries,” reports globalpolicy.org, “and banned the provision to Libya of equipment for oil refining and transportation.” 

By late August 1998 the framework of a trial was established, and used as the measure of Resolution 1192, agreeing to suspend sanctions once the suspects were handed over to the special Scottish court in the Nehterlands at Camp Zeist. Tripoli made it happen, with help from luminaries like Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia and Nelson Mandela of Africa. Megrahi and Fhimah were flown on a special flight to the Netherlands in early April, and on the 5th were official arrested at Camp Zeist and set to await their trial. Sanctions were immediately suspended, under threat of re-enforcement (that never did materialize). 

Many suspect this was never “supposed” to happen, as the evidence behind the indictment was too weak to stand up at Trial. The Crown's prosecutors managed to swing it somehow, but it took nearly two years from the handover, and a display of mental gymnastics worthy of the Realpolitik Olympics in the scale and skill of it. On January 31 2001, the three-judge panel made it official – Megrahi was legally guilty for the plot, and Fhimah was not guilty. 

From there, many insisted sanctions should be lifted to reflect Libya’s good faith through this process. But Bush and Blair balked, demanding an admission of responsibility and compensation to victims’ families before they went past suspension. It was a letter, dated 15 August 2003, from Libya’s Permanent Representative to the President of the Council Ahmed A Own, that paved the way. Own's letter explains “the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” as Libya calls itself, “has sought to cooperate in good faith throughout the past years” on solving the problems made theirs “resulting from the Lockerbie incident.” It was in this spirit that they “facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials.”

The letter also pledged Libya to cooperate with any further investigations, and to settle all compensation claims with haste, and to join the international “War on Terrorism.” It was widely (and reservedly) hailed as a bold… statement. But still evasive. It doesn’t clearly state anywhere the suspects or any Libyans were in any way actually guilty of the “incident.” Nonetheless, after a month of discussion in the Security Council, sanctions were lifted on Sept 12 2003. France and the US insisted on abstaining, but it was otherwise a unanimous vote of 13. (source) The United States’ own sanctions would remain in full force due to the general evilness of Col Gaddafy, US officials made clear. (Additional normalizations did happen in 2007). 

The Blood Libel Edits
Despite his portrayals as a crazed prophet of death, Moammar Gadaffi proved a shrewd and patient pragmatist in all this. He can't have ever believed his nation actually did the crime, but against "guilty" as a legal truth, he accepted they had no choice but to do “the time.” It’s a type of bind known to breed passive-aggressive tendencies. The Colonel’s son and likely successor Saif al Islam al Gaddafi seemed to understand it, when he was interviewed at home for the Conspiracy Files programme.

Q - Does Libya accept responsibility for the attack on Lockerbie?

A - Yes. We wrote a letter to the Security Council, saying that we are responsible for the acts of our employees, or people. But it doesn’t mean that we did it, in fact.

Q - So to be very clear on this, what you’re saying is that you accept responsibility, but you’re not admitting that you did it.

A - Of course.

(edit)

Q - That’s… to many people will sound like a very cynical way to conduct your relationship with the outside world.

A - What can you do? Without writing that letter, you will not be able to get out of the sanction.

Q - So this statement was just word play. It wasn’t an admission of guilt.

A - No. I admit that we play with the words. And we had to. We had to. There was no other… solution.

The BBC are masters, among others, of careful editing, and it helped bolster their whole “you don’t admit you’re guilty” thing where people have to explain there’s nothing to “admit” (or fail to explain that, as happened here). Thus he could, with a little imagination, appear to be saying “we don’t admit it, buuuuut of course we did it, you already know that.” Note the cut that removed some of his words from the middle of the exchange, unlikely to have been irrelevant. Thus is clearly established a cynical payout ($2.7 billion) and bit of semantics to buy up and slough off their non-admitted guilt so they could resume trade. They got away with Lockerbie using money and words and are laughing at us and making more money! 

Immediately after “there was no other solution,” the video cuts right to the interviewer asking “so it was like blood money if you like,” which seems to be referring to what was just shown. But really it refers to the American victims' families, whose “money, money, money, money” attitude (well-known and spearheaded by Victims of PA103 Inc) was “materialistic,” “greedy,” and amounted to “trading with the blood of their sons and daughters.” But with the magic of editing, it can seem to mean so much more!

Tactics to reduce chances of being asked difficult questions

What follows is an item posted on this blog on this date in 2008:

Lockerbie Trial is an Historic Miscarriage of Justice

This is the headline over another article by Hugh Miles, this time on The Cutting Edge website. [RB: Links to further articles here.] It reads in part:

'Since the British Crown never had much of a case against Megrahi, it was no surprise when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) found prima facie evidence in June 2007 that Megrahi had suffered a miscarriage of justice and recommended that he be granted a second appeal.

'For 11 years, while legal proceedings were pending and throughout the trial, the British Government argued that a public inquiry into Lockerbie was not appropriate as it would prejudice legal proceedings. After the conviction, it switched tack, arguing instead that no public inquiry was necessary. But if the conviction were overturned, there would no longer be a reason to hold back. For Megrahi, this cannot come soon enough. In September, he was diagnosed with advanced terminal prostate cancer.

'The British Government is preparing for Megrahi to be transferred to Libya for the rest of his sentence. This would eliminate the risk of an acquittal and lessen the chance of a subsequent inquiry. Applications for a transfer cannot be submitted while an appeal is pending, which for the Government raises the convenient prospect that Megrahi will abandon his appeal so he can die at home. But letting Megrahi die a condemned man reduces the chance of Scottish prosecutors, the police, various British intelligence services plus many American and other foreign bodies being asked a lot of difficult questions. In November 2008, a general agreement on the exchange of prisoners was signed between Libya and Britain paving the way for such a transfer. The agreement will be ratified in January 2009. [RB: Ratification in fact took three months longer than this.]

'"The Crown and the prosecution are using every delaying tactic in the book to close off every route available to Megrahi except prisoner transfer, as this means he has to abandon his appeal," commented Professor Robert Black QC, the Scottish lawyer who was the architect of the original trial who feels partly responsible for the miscarriage that occurred. "It is an absolute disgrace. It was June 27, 2007 when the SCCRC released its report and sent its case back to the criminal appeal court, and here we are 18 months later and the Crown has still not handed over all of the material that the law requires it to hand over and it is still making every objection conceivable."'

The full text can be read here.

"Libya’s vulnerable..., small country, Gaddafi’s hated, let’s go for it"

[The following are excerpts from an article by Alexander Zaitchik headed Lockerbie: the truth and those who dared to reveal it published yesterday on the Muslim Village website:]

The final documentary produced by the American filmmaker Allan Francovich, The Maltese Double Cross: Lockerbie was buried by the American press upon its release in 1994. It was dismissed and attacked for including testimony from terrorists, convicted felons, turncoat spooks, and others of dubious character. But mostly it was ignored. Unlike Francovich’s previous films about the US intelligence world, no art house theater screened it; no public television station aired it.

With the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Francovich has been vindicated. The basic elements of his film’s alternative theory — that the bombing of Pan Am 103 was an Iranian hit in revenge of the US downing of Iran Air 655, contracted out to a Syrian-backed, Beirut-based splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — are sturdier than ever. The official story of a lone Libyan in Malta, meanwhile, has never looked so pathetic or full of holes, especially in Scotland, scene of the crime, where polls show a majority still wants an independent investigation. This past March, the publication of a three-year Al Jazeera investigation added more ballast corroborating the basics of Double Cross.

The Maltese Double Cross was never screened or aired in the United States. Because of legal threats and official pressure, it almost never aired or screened in the UK, where the bombing killed 270 people on Dec 21, 1988. The doc’s controversial Glasgow debut followed a series of sudden cancellations, including a high-profile, last-minute erasure from the schedule of the 1994 London Film Festival. Double Cross finally opened under the defiant banner of the Scotsman newspaper, whose editors, supported by victims’ families, risked consequences to bring the film to the public. One of those editors, Lesley Riddoch, remembers thinking as the curtains parted, “Would The Scotsman, as one prominent journalist had warned, find itself frozen out of Crown Office briefings for a decade? Would we be sued, contradicted, even disappeared?”

The film and its many advocates, it turned out, weren’t easily suppressed. In 1994, nearly six years after the bombing, the British public had not forgotten the government’s sudden messaging shifts about the likely culprit, which seemed to follow a US lead, or its refusal to allow an independent investigation. Double Cross, for all of its problems, presented plausible explanations for both, often from the mouths of high U.S. officials. Following the Glasgow open, Double Cross won Best Documentary at the Edinburgh Film Festival; that spring, a truncated version of the sprawling 155-minute film aired on the UK’s Channel 4 and on Australian television.

When I first watched Double Cross in the pre-streaming year of 1995, it felt a little like watching a banned movie. A college buddy had returned from a semester at St Andrews with a choppy VHS bootleg of the Channel 4 broadcast in his suitcase. Everyone we showed it to had the same question: How was it possible this film wasn’t being shown anywhere in the US? It’s easy to forget how big a deal Lockerbie was into the mid-‘90s.

The Christmas bombing of the Pan Am jumbo jet, last century’s symbol of U.S. civilian air power, killed 189 Americans, making it the country’s deadliest act of international terrorism prior to 9/11. But after a brief flurry of skeptical reporting following the bombing, questions about Lockerbie dropped off in the US, where legal threats against broadcasters and theaters kept Double Cross off screens. The full-length version of the film is now available on YouTube.

Even the abbreviated version of Double Cross required an open notebook and heavy use of the pause and rewind buttons. Francovich, who produced several documentaries about the CIA for PBS and the BBC, was not afraid to make audiences work. He believed in letting his subjects tell the story. They talk at length, sometimes at cross-purposes, often in a domino-row of interviews without connecting tissue or explanatory bone-tosses to the viewer. But for all of its editing failures, substantive errors and questionable sources, the film deserves praise and revisiting, both as investigatory feat and intelligence-world rabbit-hole for the ages.

Few have chased rabbits home with as much energy as Francovich. Critics sometimes dismissed him as a conspiracy theorist, but he didn’t care. He dug as hard as anyone in the business, and his films were in no way analog antecedents to the investigative amateur-hours that animate the 9/11 Truth movement. His BBC2 investigation into Operation Gladio — a network of clandestine paramilitary “stay-behind” cells scattered throughout NATO countries that trained for post-apocalypse guerilla war — explored one of the juiciest Cold War veins ever tapped. His PBS dive into the CIA, On Company Business, won best documentary at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.

For Double Cross, Francovich and his main researcher, the Scottish journalist John Ashton, interviewed hundreds of subjects up and down the chain before arriving at an elaborate theory, strong in some areas, weaker in others. Like Gary Webb’s investigation, it relied on much that was already public record. But he put it all together for the first time, and worked through every implication to advance the story.

Double Cross posits that after a US warship in the Strait of Hormuz mistakenly shot down an Iran Air flight in July 1988, the Iranian regime put up $10 million to finance a revenge attack. The exiled former Iranian president Abulhassan Bani Sadr tells Francovich, “All Iranians viewed the US act as a crime [requiring justice]… Iran ordered the attack and Ahmed Jabril carried it out.”

Jabril was the Beirut-based leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [-General Command], a group known for its sophisticated bomb expertise. Jabril sent some of his best bomb makers to Frankfurt, where they caught the attention of German intelligence. In October 1988, German police arrested 17 members of the group (some with ties to Syrian intelligence) and confiscated caches of weapons and bomb material, including a primed Toshiba cassette player of the exact type used to bring down Pan Am 103. But the sweep did not put the entire cell behind bars, or stop the bombing. In early 1989, months after the downing of 103, German police conducted another raid on a PFLP safehouse in Neuss, northeast of Frankfurt, where they discovered more electrical-device bombs. Some of these bombs had altitude triggers used to bring down planes. All of this pointed clearly in the direction of Iran and Syria.

Then, on a dime, during the runup to the Gulf War, the official story told by American and British officials shifted to Libya. Jack Anderson, the muckraking syndicated columnist, reported in a January 1990 column that intelligence sources had told him that George H W Bush and Margaret Thatcher agreed to downplay the evidence pointing to Jabril, Syria and Iran. (Anderson suggests the need to keep Syria on board for the Gulf War coalition as a factor.) Forty minutes into Double Cross, Howard Teicher, senior director of Reagan’s NSC from 1985 to 1988, says he finds it unlikely the leaders of the free world would choose to frame Libya because so much corroborated intelligence “clearly links the bombing to [Iran and Syria].”

And yet, in November 1991, U.S. and UK authorities indicted two Libyans who worked for Libyan Airlines at the Malta airport, Abdel al-Megrahi and Lamen Fhimah. The key witness against al-Megrahi, the only one ultimately convicted, was a Malta shopkeeper named Tony Gauci, a witness as unreliable as anyone Francovich interviewed for his movie. Gauci picked al-Megrahi out of a suspect book after coaching from the FBI, and said he recognized him from media reports. During the trial, he said he “resembled a lot” the man who bought the clothes found at the crash site in Lockerbie, but couldn’t place his age and height in the right ballpark. He was given a $2 million reward.

The new focus on Libya timed to the arrival of Vincent Cannistraro to run the CIA’s Lockerbie investigation. During the 1980s, Cannistraro (interviewed extensively in Double Cross) and Col Oliver North ran a covert effort to undermine and destroy the Qadafi regime. In his front-page story about the program, Bob Woodward wrote that “deception and disinformation” were at the program’s heart. (...)

Subsequent reporting has vindicated Francovich’s core thesis that the Libyans were framed, and that the bombing was a tit-for-tat case of blowback caused by a trigger-happy U.S. Naval commander. In 2012, Al Jazeera acquired classified Defense Intelligence cables stating, “The execution of the operation was contracted [by Iran] to Ahmad Jabril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) leader. Money was given to Jabril upfront in Damascus for initial expense. The mission was to blow up a Pan-Am flight.”

The network also attained a copy of the Scottish police report showing dismay over the holes in the case against al-Megrahi. Had the Libyan been allowed an appeal, the report claims, he would have easily won. But appeal was denied following his non-jury trial in Holland in 2001. (At the time, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hailed the use of a third-country court as “an historic innovation in international legal practice.” Robert Black, meanwhile, the Scottish legal scholar known as the “architect” of the trial, has emerged as a leading critic of the proceedings and the official story generally.)

At the end of all this, the big question, why? Why would the US and Britain let the real culprits off the hook? Among the people interviewed in the recent Al Jazeera report is former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked on the Lockerbie investigation. “As far as I can tell,” he says, “someone said, look, Libya’s vulnerable to prosecution, small country, Gaddafi’s hated, let’s go for it. It was an executive decision, and then once that happened everybody lined up.” This accords with much earlier reporting and many of the interviews in The Maltese Double Cross.

Although mostly Americans died on Pan Am 103, conversation about Lockerbie in this country today revolves around the subject of victim pain. In October, NPR broadcast a segment about a “poignant letter” that emerged from the tragedy. The Smithsonian Channel produced a maudlin hour-long documentary last year that exploits the harrowing screams of a mother getting the news at JFK, but never touches the questions around the official story. As for Allan Francovich, he died in 1997 at the age of 56, a few years after the Glasgow premier of Double Cross. He suffered a heart attack in in the customs section of Houston’s George H W Bush International, the only airport named after a CIA chief, shortly after being detained by officials on his arrival from London. 

[It would appear that this article was first published on 15 December 2014 on the AlterNet website.]