SCCRC press release on Megrahi application

[What follows is the text of a press release issued today by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission:]

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission confirmed today that it has received a new application to review the conviction in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi.

Mr Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the murder of the 259 passengers and crew on board Pan American World Airways flight PA 103 from London to New York, and 11 residents of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. He subsequently appealed his conviction and his first appeal was refused by the High Court in 2002.

Mr Megrahi then applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for a review of his conviction in 2003, and, after a full review, his case was referred by the Commission to the High Court for a new appeal in 2007. Mr Megrahi subsequently abandoned that appeal in 2009. He was released from prison on compassionate grounds shortly thereafter. Mr Megrahi died from cancer in 2012.

The Commission received a further application in June 2014, which was made on Mr Megrahi’s behalf. The Commission rejected this application in 2015, concluding that it was not in the interests of justice at that time to proceed with the review. The reasons for this were detailed in our press releases issued on 5 and 6 November 2015 (currently available on our website). The main reason however was that despite various requests having been made of the Megrahi family, and of the late Mr Megrahi’s previous solicitors, Taylor & Kelly, for access to materials relating to the 2007-2009 appeal, these had not been forthcoming.

In rejecting the application in 2015 the Commission made it clear that it remained open in the future for the matter to be considered again by the SCCRC, but that it was unlikely that any future application would be accepted for a review unless it was accompanied by the original appeal materials to be sourced directly from Mr Megrahi`s solicitors.

Gerard Sinclair, the Chief Executive of the SCCRC, said today:

“As it does in every case the Commission will now give careful consideration to this new application. In particular, we will immediately be looking to see that this fresh application fully addresses the matters which we identified as missing from the application in 2015, and in particular provides access to the original appeal papers from Mr Megrahi`s solicitors.

“If the Commission accepts the application for a full review there are several important considerations which will affect the timescale within which we will be able to deal with this matter, including any new lines of enquiry and the fact that the membership of the Board has completely changed since the original referral in 2007.”

The Commission does not intend to make any further comment at this time.

Megrahi family lodge application with SCCRC

[What follows is the text of a report just published on the website of The Sun:]

The family of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi have lodged a new bid to appeal against his conviction, five years after his death.

Lawyer Aamer Anwar joined family members and supporters to hand files to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in Glasgow.

Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the 1988 atrocity which killed 270 people.

He was jailed for 27 years but died of prostate cancer aged 60 in 2012 after being released on compassionate grounds in 2009.

He lost an appeal against his conviction in 2002, with the SCCRC recommending in 2007 that he should be granted a second appeal.

He dropped the second attempt to overturn his conviction in 2009, ahead of his return to Libya, but his widow Aisha and son Ali met Mr Anwar late last year to discuss a posthumous appeal to overturn the murder conviction.

The SCCRC will now decide whether there are grounds to refer the case to the appeal court.

The move has the support of Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga also died.

It is believed the new appeal bid is based on concerns over the evidence that convicted the Libyan, including that given by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who died last year.

Mr Anwar said: “It has been a long journey in the pursuit for truth and justice. When Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, killing 271 people from 21 countries, it still remains the worst terrorist atrocity ever committed in the UK – 28 years later the truth remains elusive.

“The reputation of Scottish law has suffered both at home and internationally because of widespread doubts about the conviction of Mr al-Megrahi.

“It is in the interests of justice and restoring confidence in our criminal justice system that these doubts can be addressed. However the only place to determine whether a miscarriage of justice did occur is in the appeal court, where the evidence can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.” 

[RB: As of 09.45 the report is no longer to be found on The Sun website. But at 11.00 a virtually identical report was posted on the Sky News website. As of 11.13 this report can no longer be found on the Sky News website. What on earth is going on? However, there's now reliable confirmation: see Aamer Anwar at 11.26 on Twitter. The reports on the websites of The Sun and Sky News are now (13.30) back up again. It looks as if they may have originally published embargoed material a bit early.] 

US blames Iran for downing of IR 655

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on this date in 1988 in the The Washington Post. It provides evidence of the official disinformation that was being disseminated by the United States Government in the immediate aftermath of the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes:]

A US warship fighting gunboats in the Persian Gulf yesterday mistook an Iranian civilian jetliner for an attacking Iranian F14 fighter plane and blew it out of the hazy sky with a heat-seeking missile, the Pentagon announced. Iran said 290 persons were aboard the European-made A300 Airbus and that all had perished.

"The US government deeply regrets this incident," Adm William J Crowe Jr, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference.

The disaster occurred at mid-morning over the Strait of Hormuz, when the airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, on what Iran described as a routine 140-mile flight from its coastal city of Bandar Abbas southwest to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, apparently strayed too close to two US Navy warships that were engaged in a battle with Iranian gunboats.

The USS Vincennes, a cruiser equipped with the most sophisticated radar and electronic battle gear in the Navy's surface arsenal, tracked the oncoming plane electronically, warned it to keep away, and when it did not fired two Standard surface-to-air missiles.

Navy officials said the Vincennes' combat teams believed the airliner to be an Iranian F14 jet fighter. No visual contact was made with the aircraft until it was struck and blew up about six miles from the Vincennes; the plane's wreckage fell in Iranian territorial waters, Navy officials said. (...)

Iran accused the United States of a "barbaric massacre" and vowed to "avenge the blood of our martyrs."

President Reagan in a statement said he was "saddened to report" that the Vincennes "in a proper defensive action" had shot down the jetliner. "This is a terrible human tragedy. Our sympathy and condolences go out to the passengers, crew, and their families . . . . We deeply regret any loss of life."

Reagan, who was spending the Fourth of July holiday at Camp David, said the Iranian aircraft "was headed directly for the Vincennes" and had "failed to heed repeated warnings." The cruiser, he said, fired "to protect itself against possible attack."

News of the downing of the plane began with sharply conflicting accounts from Iran and from the Defense Department of what had transpired in the Persian Gulf. Early yesterday, Tehran broadcast accusations that the United States had downed an unarmed airliner.

The Pentagon at first denied the Iranian claims, declaring that information from the fleet indicated that the Vincennes, equipped with the Aegis electronic battle management system, had shot down an attacking Iranian F14 jet fighter. But after sifting through more detailed reports and electronic intelligence, Reagan directed the Pentagon to confirm there had been a tragic case of mistaken identity in the war-torn gulf.

Crowe, in his hastily called news conference at the Pentagon, also backed up the skipper of the Vincennes and faulted the Iranian airline pilot.

Crowe said the Airbus had flown four miles west of the usual commercial airline route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai and that the pilot ignored repeated radioed warnings from the Vincennes to change course.

Why and how the Vincennes mistook the bulky, wide-bodied Airbus A300 for a sleek, supersonic F14 fighter plane barely a third the transport's size will be the subject of "a full investigation," Reagan promised. A military team under the command of Rear Adm William N Fogarty of the US Central Command will leave this week to begin that investigation, Defense Department officials said.

“It happened. It shouldn’t have. It is obviously unacceptable”

[What follows is the text of a report headlined Maltese shopkeeper offered ‘unlimited funds’ for Lockerbie testimony that was published in the Maltese newspaper The Independent on this date in 2011:]

Former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC has admitted that new documents show Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, whose evidence was the cornerstone in convicting Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie disaster did receive payment for his testimony.

The issue has been a hot potato for years and while American authorities insist that witnesses were never paid, the former law chief who led the Lockerbie bombing probe hit out after a leaked report claimed key witness Gauci had been paid £1.2million to testify.

In recent comments to The Scottish Sun, Lord Fraser said: “I have to accept that it happened. It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it. It is obviously unacceptable in the biggest case of mass murder ever carried out in Europe.”

He added that he had warned Scottish investigators at the time that offering bribes to witnesses would be “unacceptable”.

But a documentary aired recently on Al Jazeera, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber?, has revealed papers claiming Gauci was offered “unlimited funds” before he was paid.

The claims are made in findings from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which insists there is evidence of a mistrial, findings which had led convicted bomber Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi to launch an appeal against his conviction. The appeal was ditched two years ago when al-Megrahi was released from jail suffering from cancer.

The report was kept under wraps until now, despite the efforts of the SNP to release them.

The findings, which rely heavily on diary entries by retired Strathclyde Police detective Harry Bell, also say Gauci’s brother Paul received £600,000, despite not testifying.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission report says Scottish police applied to US authorities for reward cash after the trial and “substantial payments were received by both Tony and Paul Gauci after the appeal”.

Tony Gauci became the key witness as clothes from the suitcase that carried the bomb on Pan Am flight 103 - which killed 270 in 1988 - were traced back to his shop in Malta.

In addition to the payment of the Maltese witness for testimony, the Commission had previously found several other problems with the evidence on which al-Megrahi had been convicted.

Mr al-Megrahi’s appeal had been granted after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found the reliability of Maltese evidence used to convict the former Libyan intelligence agent of carrying out as highly questionable and recommended he be granted an appeal.

Al-Megrahi had been convicted largely on the basis of evidence supplied by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci of Mary’s House Tower Road Sliema. In his evidence Mr Gauci had identified Al-Megrahi as the purchaser of articles of clothing and an umbrella found in the suitcase - placed on an Air Malta flight and transferred to the Pan Am flight in Frankfurt - containing the bomb.

The Commission, however, found “there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988”, an argument that had sealed the indictment against Al-Megrahi.

The Commission noted that although it had been proven Al-Megrahi had been in Malta on several occasions in the month in question, it was determined through new evidence submitted that 7 December 1988 was the only date on which he would have had the opportunity to make the purchases from Mary’s House.

New evidence in the Commission’s hands at the time, not heard at the trial, concerned the date on which Christmas lights had been illuminated in Sliema near Mary’s House which, taken together with Mr Gauci’s evidence at trial and the contents of his police statements, indicates the purchase of the incriminating items had taken place before 6 December 1988 – when no evidence had been presented at trial to the effect that the applicant was in Malta before 6 December.

Yet more new evidence given to the Commission indicates that Mr Gauci, four days before the identification parade at which he picked out Al-Megrahi, had seen a photograph of Al-Megrahi in a magazine article linking him to the bombing.

The Commission found Mr Gauci’s exposure to the photograph, so close to the date of the identity parade, “undermines the reliability of his identification of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself”.

US plot to snatch Megrahi

[On this date in 2011 an article headlined US tells Libya rebels: Capture the Lockerbie bomber for us was published on the Mail Online website. It reads in part:]

A dramatic mission to capture the freed Lockerbie bomber from Libya and return him to face justice in the United States was revealed last night.

Under a secret deal between Barack Obama and Libyan rebel leaders, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi would be detained by opposition troops and then handed over to US Special Forces.

Senior Congressional sources in Washington have disclosed to The Mail on Sunday that President Obama has told the Libyan rebels through intermediaries that a condition of continued support from the US is that they must hand over Megrahi if they enter Tripoli.

The mission would involve Megrahi being flown to a neutral Arab country by US Special Forces once he is handed over by the rebels, and then on to America to face trial. [RB: Megrahi had already faced trial and been convicted -- wrongly, in my view -- in a process that the United States supported and participated in. He could not have been tried again in the USA unless Federal Law had been changed to allow it.] British SAS soldiers are unlikely to be directly involved in the operation. (...)

If Megrahi is captured, the hope is he may implicate Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in the Lockerbie bomb plot.

The plan to capture the bomber came after US Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez met Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder last week to demand the US ‘continue working to return Abdelbaset Al Megrahi to prison’.

Mr Menendez has amended a Congressional Bill authorising the continued use of force in Libya to include a paragraph ordering ‘the continuation of Federal investigations into the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103’.

Congressional sources disclosed that the US will ‘grab’ Megrahi as soon as they can. (...)

When the US State Department was asked to comment on the Megrahi plot, an official said he would ‘take the question’. This is a regular tactic used by the State Department enabling it to neither confirm nor deny what is put to officials.

US government sources say if Megrahi were found guilty after a trial, he would get life without parole.

Although there would be calls for him to be executed, international pressure is likely to prevent the death sentence being carried out.

Megrahi questions continue to find voice in Scottish public sphere

[What follows is the text of an item posted on the Lallands Peat Worrier website on this date in 2011:]

Delayed recognition, but I dare say that some of you might not have noticed interesting progress in Holyrood this week, on the Justice for Megrahi petition. I was waiting for the parliamentary authorities to upload the official report to get a read of what committee members actually said in the course of their deliberations - but it has not yet materialised. Ho hum. So I thought I'd crack on anyway, while the development is still remotely contemporary. By way of background, the petition was presented to the parliament's Public Petitions Committee in the last session by Dr Jim Swire, Robert Black QC and other and despite some technical hitches in the process, attracted some 1,646 signatures. The petition calls...

"...on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988."

After taking evidence from the petitioners, the Petitions Committee wrote to the Scottish Government, asking three discrete questions:

Will you open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988 as called for by the petitioner and for the reasons given in the petition?

If not, will you provide a detailed explanation why not, specifying whether there is any legislation which would prevent you from holding such an inquiry, what this legislation is and how it prevents?

Who would have the power to undertake an inquiry in the terms proposed in the petition?

The government's answer to all three questions was basically - no. Ministers responded in the following terms towards the end of January this year:

The Cabinet Secretary for Justice made clear in his response of 16 September to a Parliamentary Question (S3W-35844) from George Foulkes on this issue that the Government have no plans to initiate an inquiry on this issue.

The Government does not doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr Al-Megrahi. He was tried and convicted by a Scottish court before three judges and his appeal against conviction, heard by a panel of five judges, was unsuccessful. A second appeal, following a referral from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, was abandoned by Mr Al-Megrahi. The conduct of his defence during his trial and the appeals, including his decision not to give evidence at trial and the decision to abandon the second appeal, was entirely a matter for Mr Al-Megrahi and his legal advisors.

The Government’s view is that the petition is inviting the Scottish Government to do something which falls properly to the criminal justice system i.e. inquire into whether a miscarriage of justice has taken place. The criminal justice system already provides a mechanism for that to happen. The fact that Mr Al-Megrahi chose to abandon his second appeal rather than pursue it is entirely a matter for him and it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to institute an inquiry as a result.

The Inquiries Act 2005 provides that, to the extent that the matters dealt with are devolved, and criminal justice is devolved, the Scottish Government would have the power to conduct an inquiry. However, the wide ranging and international nature of the issues involved (even if the inquiry is confined to the trial and does not concern itself with wider matters) means that there is every likelihood of issues arising which are not devolved, which would require either a joint inquiry with or a separate inquiry by the UK government.

Separately, the Scottish Government intends to bring forward legislation to allow the SCCRC to publish a statement of reasons in cases such as Mr Al-Megrahi's where an appeal is abandoned, subject of course to legal restrictions applying to the SCCRC such as data protection, the convention rights of individuals and international obligations attaching to information provided by foreign authorities.

The Committee also received correspondence from such varied bodies as the Lord Advocate and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, asking the latter whether they can re-open an abandoned appeal before the Court of Criminal Appeal. On the 28th of June, the freshly constituted Public Petitions Committee agreed "to refer the petition to the Justice Committee under Rule 15.6.2 for further consideration".  Under the parliament's standing orders, the Committee could have responded in a number of ways. It might have unilaterally closed the petition [Rule 15.7]. Indeed, Holyrood's Justice Committee may decide to do so in due course. One significant aspect of this development is that the chair of the committee to which the petition has been referred, the SNP's Christine Grahame, has gone on record on several occasions, questioning Megrahi's guilt. Of course, by no means does the petition's continuing survival in Holyrood suggest that any independent public enquiry will be held into the case. What it does mean, however, is that questions about the evidence against Megrahi and his culpability for the atrocity over Lockerbie will continue to find voice [in] the Scottish public sphere, in the months to come.

[RB: Six years later the petition remains open before the Justice Committee and the “questions about the evidence against Megrahi and his culpability for the atrocity over Lockerbie” accordingly continue to find voice in the Scottish public sphere.]

The evidence I had been listening to couldn't lead to that verdict

[What follows is excerpted from a long article profiling Jim and Jane Swire that was published in The Herald on this date in 2007:]

Last Thursday's ruling that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing can appeal for a second time means Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi may soon return home to his wife and children. "He belongs back at home with his family," says Jim, who - along with Jane - has long been convinced of Megrahi's innocence. (...)

Flora Swire was training to be a neurosurgeon when she met young American doctor Hart Lidov. She began commuting regularly across the Atlantic to see him and, just before Christmas, decided on a whim to fly to New York so they could spend the holiday together. (...)

When the news first broke on television, the Swires tried to quell rising panic with a conviction that it couldn't be her plane - the timing didn't match the details she had given.But as they realised it had been delayed, the terrible truth hit.

"When that bomb went off it turned all our lives upside down," says Jim simply, and trails off as Jane takes over: "It changes your attitude to everything. You never quite learn to live with it. Well, you do your best, but it changes you. It's one of the worst nightmares any parent can have, to lose their precious child."

Blindly, the couple stumbled through those early days of realisation. Jane was driven by a desperate determination to hold their remaining family - including 16-year-old son William and 19-year-old daughter Cathy - together. But with questions imploding in his mind, Jim was rapidly forming a conviction: that the only way to make sense of his daughter's death was to find out exactly what had happened, and who was responsible.

Within weeks, Jim Swire's craggy charismatic face, mane of white hair, and quiet, dignified air had become familiar to news viewers and newspaper readers, as he took up the role of spokesman for the victims' families' campaign. He shored up information as if it were a shield that could protect him from the horror of what had happened, and flew around the world to meet experts, attend conferences and shed light on the shady world of international terrorism. Each answer led to another question. He hadn't meant to go so far. "I would never have dreamed that I would set out on an 18-year campaign," he admits now. "But I found - still find - the whole business of not unravelling who killed her, or why she wasn't protected, an insult to her memory. It means she didn't matter. She was just cannon fodder and happened to be in the way when something ghastly happened. And I can't take that line."

He was, he notes drily, ideally equipped for the journey. After graduating from Cambridge, where he met his wife, he joined the army and learned about plastic explosives and detonating bombs. A brief spell with the BBC before he became a doctor provided insight into the workings of the media organisations that would later prove so useful to his campaign.

When the suspects were named he pushed unwaveringly for a trial, flying three times to Tripoli to meet Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, convinced he could get him on side. "You might not think there was any common ground between a GP from the Midlands and an army colonel turned dictator based in an Arab country. But there was," he smiles faintly. "He had lost his adopted daughter Hannah when she was just 15 months old, when the US bombed Tripoli in 1986. I took a book of pictures of Flora, making sure there was one of her at just that age."

He enjoys telling the stories about James Bond-style meetings in Gaddafi's headquarters: describing a journey in a blacked-out Mercedes; recalling the way the portcullis in the wall opened as if by magic, the steel teeth of the security gate, Gaddafi's all-female team of bodyguards, who released their gun catches in unison when he approached the Libyan leader to pin a badge proclaiming "Pan Am 103 - the truth must be known" on his flowing green robes. (...)

In 2001, Jim got what he wanted - a trial, to be held under Scottish law in the Dutch town of Zeist. Before leaving for Holland, the couple watched on television as Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, his co-accused, arrived (Fhimah was cleared).

"When I saw these two people being led from the plane, the feeling was so emotional," says Jane, "the twist in my gut, as I watched the men I thought were responsible for my daughter's death. We believed this was the trial that would lead to some sort of resolution. It would spell justice. But it would never bring Flora back. And the who, when, why and what were questions that had always been so much more important to Jim than they were to me. I was just busy trying to come to terms with the loss of my Flora."

Her husband leans forward, his voice low. "Now Jane, but you also accept that it was my way of coping."

She nods. "Well, yes, but it couldn't ever have been mine. I had to step away, to care for the rest of my family." She swallows, then adds: "But in essence, what Jim has done is something to approve of. Many people weren't keen for this to happen. Someone needed to fight."

Jim Swire's fight was certainly not universally popular. There was hate mail - "really nasty stuff", he confides - and criticism from many of the American victims' relatives, who saw things in more black-and-white terms.

For Jim those complexities became all too clear as he sat, day after day, in the courtroom, realising with slow, sinking disappointment that he could not contain the nagging doubts that these men had nothing to do with the atrocity that killed his daughter. As he listened to the evidence he grew less and less convinced of its authenticity. "When I went to that trial I thought I was going to watch the trial and conviction of the two guys who had murdered my daughter. But what I heard there led me to peel away from the belief that this was going to reveal the truth."

When the verdict was finally read out, Jim Swire collapsed. "I just couldn't conceive that they could have found him guilty," he says, extending his bony fingers in a gesture of bewilderment. "I fainted with shock. I went to Eton: I was taught to question things, not to accept them at face value.

"But my education also drummed into me to be respectful of authority. Those judges in their regalia - with all the pomp and circumstance, and the helicopters bringing them in and out - were very impressive, so I respected them. The fact that I believed they had strength and integrity only made it worse when they pronounced him guilty. Because the evidence I had been listening to surely couldn't lead to that verdict."

Back in England, Jane was also struggling. "I really wanted that conviction to be right," she admits. But try as she might for Flora's sake, she couldn't believe in it. Now, with another appeal and new evidence on the horizon, the couple feel the truth may be closer once again.

Lockerbie: a disgraceful episode for Scots law

[This is the headline over an article by Ian Bell that appeared in The Herald on 30 June 2007. It reads as follows:]

Sometimes, justice miscarries. Mistakes are made. The innocent pay a heavy price for innocent stupidity and duly we mourn those dull, collective human errors, our endless, fathomless fallibility. Sometimes.

At other times, legality becomes a lethal weapon. Everyone becomes a conspiracy theorist. Who did kill Jack Kennedy? A mere five words, but a big question. Who bombed Lockerbie? Just three words, but worth the asking, I think, for the sake of 270 dead in a shower of falling corpses over a corner of Scotland.

Someone - the eternal "they" - ignited an aircraft over my small country. They then attempted to hinder an investigation, prevent a trial and sought to keep the bereaved from the truth. They, the hag-ridden Foggy Bottom desk-jockeys, did not even plant the bomb. So who did?

Not many days ago, the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, was being accused of vote-grubbing because he suggested that an occupant of 10 Downing Street was trading prisoners without the consent of the Holyrood parliament. Not for the first time, mass murder and diplomacy appeared to be in conflict. Salmond, they said, was "picking a fight" with London. Over mass murder?

He's glib, but not that glib. I'm glib, too, but I can write a bit, sometimes. If the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has concluded that the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is "unsafe" what, exactly, is going on?

This is the man's second appeal. This is merely the latest confirmation that an £80m "Scottish" trial in the Netherlands was rigged. This is still more proof that Iran/Syria did the job, as was always obvious. This is the proof, if you needed such, that you live in a comatose colony of the United States of America, with justice for all.

Grow up. Lockerbie was traded away as necessary barter when Gulf War I mattered most to the ruling party in Washington. Afterwards, it became a mere nuisance. Who planted the bomb and slaughtered all those people? Who - and I offer the merest gloss of the cruel official paraphrase - cares?

Another device has just turned up in London, as I write. It is, might have been, a big one, tucked into a nice, big, unassuming car. He bombs us; we bomb him; so civilisations clash. It is intended to be understood as a lesson. Welcome to the job, Mr Brown.

But is that how it really is, or ever was? You cannot argue with a very large explosive device. I saw bleeding Omagh on the morning after: I am not actually naive. I do wonder, though, about the political uses of terror, or rather about the political utility of ignorant fear. They like us to be worried.

Lockerbie was not designed by one of Tony Blair's "implacable foes". Bin Laden, far less Libya and the poor sap, Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, had nothing to do with it. The atrocity was a trading of blows, diplomatically-speaking, and meant to be understood as such by people who mean to matter, after America "accidentally" brought down an Iranian passenger jet. Just the 270 dead in Scotland, then.

This is how they run your world. Your faiths and allegiances are entirely incidental. The real point about Lockerbie is that it happened above and inside a very small country that did not have the means to object, or to respond. The "integrity of the Scottish legal system", once co-respondent in the birth of the European Enlightenment, was treated as a joke. Is it to remain a joke?

Let's see. When the criminal cases review commission detects the possibility of legal discomfort for the body politic, it is saying, in effect, that a conviction stinks.

It's lousy. The commission has spent years on this case and it reports, at your considerable expense, that Scots law cannot begin to digest the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. Where now?

Salmond, First Minister, has said a very few words. The apparatus of the Scottish state will not expand on those, when last I checked. Legally, things are very tricky, possibly by design. But the worst terrorist atrocity in our history should count for more than a squabble between Edinburgh and London. A few CIA men in a Scottish court, with their past and present masters in tow, might suffice.

Don't hold your breath, though. It is a truly shocking thing to say about the Lockerbie carnage, but that slaughter was a mere glimpse of how this world is run. Oddly - a plot may be involved - I didn't need a conspiracy theorist to tell me as much. Why will the al-Megrahi case refuse to go away? Why will no-one answer the questions? Why is Scots law debased? Why, for that matter, are "improvised explosive devices" being found on the streets of London?

This space is reserved for an "essay". I take it to mean that I should provide more than the usual comment. I take that to suggest I should attempt a meaning, if any, in Mr al-Megrahi's inevitable return to court, what it implies for Scottish justice and what it says about the British state.

The former would be better off without the latter. An innocent man would have done better under a real democracy than in our version of a civic society.

And London bombs may yet speak for themselves.

Risk an idea. Ask yourself if the horror of 9/11 did not, in fact, begin over Lockerbie. Then ask yourself why either horror was imaginable, or imagined.

Ask yourself what is being done in your name. In London, glib as I could ever manage, the revisionists these days mock the notion. They think "Not in My Name" is funny. I've h eard them laugh.

So who murdered the Lockerbie innocents? As well, ask who put a pair of 20-year-olds from Fife into a British uniform, in someone else's country and invited a sacrifice for no reason I could name.

That was this week: history already. My fumbling point is that these things are connected. If you need an essay on the dignity of Scots law, think of our security state and our traditions of jurisprudence. Are we truly at war? With whom? Why? By which Act of either parliament?

Justice miscarries, sometimes. Cops and lawyers and courts get it wrong, now and then. Those same fallible people spend many days protecting the rest of us from ourselves.

But the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is an example of a system corrupted, for base political ends, by people who do not take your democracy seriously.

He didn't do it. No-one with a straight face thinks otherwise.

The Americans, the Iranians, Gaddafi, the Syrians and some pensionable suits in Whitehall can supply the details.

So Salmond picks a fight with London? Not exactly. For now, our executive is very circumspect. It needs, so it believes, to take care. But as this case continues to unravel, a robust political exchange, as such things are known, may become unavoidable.

The atrocity happened on our soil. Our national legal system was somewhat compromised. Scotland was wounded, then insulted, then treated as a colony's colony.

I don't think I've used the word too often before, but the al-Megrahi case is a disgrace.