Steadfast refusal to review multiple and obvious mistakes

[What follows is the text of a letter submitted by Dr Jim Swire to The Herald on 23 May but not (as yet) published:]

Whatever the jihadist background may have been to the brutal slaying in London [Woolwich], we should not forget that the front line against jihadist hatred is our intelligence services, who usually are effective in preventing such attacks. We owe them a great deal.

The second line however is our justice system, which is charged with assembling the evidence against those who are alleged to have broken our laws and conducting a trial where the evidence is impartially shared by prosecution and defence before judges who depend upon the authenticity and completeness of the evidence led, to reach their conclusions, then administer to the guilty the punishments agreed by the society which those judges serve.

To function properly that justice system needs not only to weigh the facts fairly, but to be seen to do so by the community it serves.

Unfortunately in the case of Lockerbie, the worst terrorist outrage we have yet seen in  our country, far from transparency, we see the combined proprietors of our Scottish justice system - our Crown Office and our SNP Government colluding to prevent a clear review of what may have gone wrong. Make no mistake, our prosecution system is now interdependent with our Government.

There has been steadfast refusal to review multiple and obvious mistakes to an extent which must make even the most avid critics of 'conspiracy theorists' uneasy. Within one of our own police evidence bags was found a fragment of circuit board which seemed to support the long journey of a Lockerbie bomb via Frankfurt from Malta and thence from Libya.

That bag contained a fragment of circuit board, a mimic of a corner of a Libyan owned timer unit, yet for 15 months now we have known that the fragment could not have come from such a timer because its detailed metallurgy conformed to cutting edge production trechnology of the late 80s but was simply not compatible with that on the older Libyan timer boards from which it was accepted by the court as having come.

One would expect that there would be alarm in judicial or even Scottish Government circles about this discrepancy, for make no mistake, this fragment was crucial to the alleged circuitous transfer of a Libyan bomb from Malta via Frankfurt to Heathrow, and thus to the conviction of the late Baset al-Megrahi.

Yet in the fifteen months since this definitive discovery, complete with the corroborating evidence of independent scientists based in the UK was made public, neither the Crown Office nor their investigating police force nor any arm of Scottish Government had even bothered to check the findings of these scientists.

If our criminal justice system is to remain our ultimate bulwark in the West in dealing with those who can be shown to break our laws, it's own legitimacy must be its impartiality and transparency. But the law is a human creation and therefore can make mistakes. It must therefore be required to review alleged errors in the interest of improving future performance and maintaining public confidence.

When neither those involved in prosecutions, nor those involved in Government who do have the power to do so, are prepared to stand up for true justice, let Scottish citizens beware should they ever have occasion to quarrel with our leaders in future.