[This is the headline over a report in today's Scottish edition of The Sunday Times. It reads as follows:]
A representative of families of American victims of the Lockerbie disaster has likened those questioning the guilt of the convicted Libyan bomber to “Holocaust deniers”.
Frank Duggan, an official spokesman for Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, described those who believe Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is innocent as a “shameless band of conspiracy mavens”.
Those criticised include Christine Grahame, the nationalist MSP, her researcher Mark Hirst, Robert Black, the Edinburgh-based legal expert who helped broker Megrahi’s trial in the Netherlands and Gareth Peirce, the London-based human rights lawyer.
In an email sent to Richard Marquise, a former FBI official who headed the investigation, Duggan said Grahame, Hirst, Black and Peirce were “no worse than Holocaust deniers who will not accept the facts before their faces”.
Grahame, who believes that Iran, not Libya, was behind the 1988 bombing, which claimed 270 lives, said Duggan’s comments were ludicrous. “My father and the fathers and grandfathers of many of the other people who are seeking the truth about who attacked Pan Am 103 were fighting the perpetrators of the Holocaust for three years before the US saw fit to get involved,” she said.
Hirst accused Duggan of a “highly personal” smear campaign against those who doubted the safety of Megrahi’s conviction.
The row reflects anger among the families of the American victims at the decision by Kenny MacAskill, the justice minister, to free Megrahi on compassionate grounds. Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, has outlived his three-month prognosis. Last week, MacAskill defended his decision to a Holyrood inquiry into the handling of Megrahi’s release, insisting that the medical advice was “quite clear”.
US intelligence files published last week claim Megrahi was involved in buying and developing chemical weapons for Libya.
Black declined to comment and Peirce was unavailable for comment.
[I declined to comment since I was unwilling to descend into the gutter with Mr Duggan.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which, on six grounds, found that Mr Megrahi's conviction may have amounted to a miscarriage of justice, no better than Holocaust deniers, forsooth!
According to The Chambers Dictionary "maven" or "mavin" is US slang, from Yiddish, for pundit or expert.
The full e-mail exchange between Mr Duggan, Richard Marquise and Mr Hirst can be read here.
An interesting commentary (in German) on The Sunday Times article can be found on the Austrian Wings website. A more general article on the Lockerbie affair on the same website by Editor in Chief Patrick Radosta can be read here.]
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Ignoring Mission Spam above, and commenting on the article, I merely wonder how much money Mr. Duggan received one way and another, based on the assumption that the bombing was carried out as "advertised". There was a case for negligence against Pan Am that netted relatives a great deal of money, then of course the millions from Libya.
ReplyDeleteI could imagine someone who had been made rich in that way wouldn't be too comfortable contemplating the possibility that the basis for the awards was spurious.
I suspect Duggan works for the CIA and his task is to keep the victims'relatives on a path to suit the agenda of the US and UK governments and in particular to stop the probing.
ReplyDeleteFrom the AM Law Daily,
In the early 1990s, President George H.W. Bush named Duggan to a presidential commission on aviation security and terrorism that studied the Lockerbie bombing. Duggan eventually became president of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, a group that represents the families of American victims seeking to uncover the truth behind the December 21 attack.
Ruth said
ReplyDelete"I suspect Duggan works for the CIA and his task is to keep the victims'relatives on a path..."
As they say: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Duggan has closed his mind towards the important evidence that has surfaced over the years.
He is forced to do that, as admitting it would be digging the grave for what he needs to defend. An example is the information about the payment offered to Tony Gauci, something that would induce doubts in some of those US families who are kept in the belief that Megrahi had a fair trial.
There is only one solution: denying.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkehXY26Ghw , discussion with Galloway, posted earlier)
Duggan is simply a Lockerbie denier.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhy should he close his mind to important information? It's far more likely that if the US wanted to keep the real perpetrators of the bombing under wraps that they would use an agent to keep the relatives in line.
ReplyDeleteHoly crap. He's looked closely at the evidence? At President Bush's request? That blows my "right-wing kneejerk know-nothing" theory out of the water and I'm left with nothing but a bad feeling from Mr. Duggan's location.
ReplyDeleteRuth wrote:
ReplyDelete"It's far more likely that if the US wanted to keep the real perpetrators of the bombing under wraps that they would use an agent to keep the relatives in line."
Of course you may be right. But I think Duggan is a bad choice for an agent, very poor argumentation and losing his head. Then again, good argumentation for his point of view is getting harder and harder as the case rolls up - so don't ask me what else he could do.
I too have been compared with a Holocaust denier by Mr Duggan, so I smartly replied to him that there was rather more factual evidence for the Holocaust than Mr Megrahi's guilt. Naturally, I have not heard from him since, as he is only capable of making "yellow-press" criticisms. Such stuff passes for debate in modern America.
ReplyDeleteDr Swire is convinced that Mr Duggan has no connection with Pan Am 103. The wrongly named VPAF103, for in my opinion all the victims died on the might of 21 December 1988 at or near Lockerbie, and its membership necessarily only consists of friends or relatives of the victims, (but that necessary qualification does not meet the needs of modern American victimology, and so Mr Duggan is a victim at two removes.
He gives the impression of having been parachuted into the group by people with an interest in keeping the Libyan attribution going.
Charles, as you may have seen, I've asked Mr. Duggan about this, informed mostly by that comment. This would be as good a place as any, if you can, to explain the "two removes" thing, or any details you've come across.
ReplyDeleteBecause I really had the impression from the name, as I'm sure others do, that Mr. Duggan should be treated with the reverent awe one has for family of those killed. It would be nice to know if this is true. A google search for "Frank Duggan, who lost" reveals zero hits, FWIW.