[What follows is excerpted from an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer published on this date in 2008 in OhmyNews International:]
On May 7, Britain's Court of Appeal ruled that the Government had been wrong to include an Iranian opposition group on its list of terrorist organizations.
In a 22-page document, the Court of Appeal ruled there were "no valid grounds" to contend that a British panel made legal errors when it ordered the removal of the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI) from a list of more than 20 proscribed terrorist organizations under Britain's Terrorism Act. (...)
The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq [MEK], is a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran [NCRI]. (...)
The PMOI was also listed as a terrorist organization by the United States in 1997 and the European Union in 2002 on the basis of the 2001 British finding against the PMOI. The PMOI believes that all Member States of the European Union will follow the UK ruling and remove the organization from their terrorist organizations list.
The group is most famous for having revealed in 2002 the existence of a secret nuclear program in Iran, which was eventually confirmed by the IAEA inspectors.
The NCRI unambiguously blames Tehran for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over the town of Lockerbie. On their official web site one can read the following.
"The policy of kowtowing to the Iranians goes back a long way. It started in the late 1980s when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the then foreign secretary, attempted to establish a constructive dialogue with the mullahs in what proved a futile attempt to persuade Teheran to free British hostages in Lebanon.
"As part of this policy, the British government took the shameful decision to drop its claim that the Iranians had masterminded the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in December 1988, even though British intelligence uncovered significant evidence of Iranian involvement."
On May 7, Britain's Court of Appeal ruled that the Government had been wrong to include an Iranian opposition group on its list of terrorist organizations.
In a 22-page document, the Court of Appeal ruled there were "no valid grounds" to contend that a British panel made legal errors when it ordered the removal of the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI) from a list of more than 20 proscribed terrorist organizations under Britain's Terrorism Act. (...)
The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq [MEK], is a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran [NCRI]. (...)
The PMOI was also listed as a terrorist organization by the United States in 1997 and the European Union in 2002 on the basis of the 2001 British finding against the PMOI. The PMOI believes that all Member States of the European Union will follow the UK ruling and remove the organization from their terrorist organizations list.
The group is most famous for having revealed in 2002 the existence of a secret nuclear program in Iran, which was eventually confirmed by the IAEA inspectors.
The NCRI unambiguously blames Tehran for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over the town of Lockerbie. On their official web site one can read the following.
"The policy of kowtowing to the Iranians goes back a long way. It started in the late 1980s when Sir Geoffrey Howe, the then foreign secretary, attempted to establish a constructive dialogue with the mullahs in what proved a futile attempt to persuade Teheran to free British hostages in Lebanon.
"As part of this policy, the British government took the shameful decision to drop its claim that the Iranians had masterminded the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in December 1988, even though British intelligence uncovered significant evidence of Iranian involvement."
"In a 22-page document, the Court of Appeal ruled there were "no valid grounds" to contend that a British panel made legal errors when it ordered the removal of the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI) from a list of more than 20 proscribed terrorist organizations under Britain's Terrorism Act. (...)"
ReplyDeleteAh, well, it is a bit off-topic, or maybe not:
Just like for Megrahi, again we see that an appeal court does not actually re-evaluate the issue, but instead if the people behind the first verdict "made legal errors".
It remains a sict construct, which one would expect had been made to avoid stepping on the toes of those who made the first verdict, at the cost of justice.
Should a third appeal then be an evaluation of whether the previous appeal court had made legal errors when evaluating whether legal errors was made in the original trial?
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An appeal court must be a complete re-evaluation of the evidence by people being as independent as possible to those having made the first verdict.
Again I sit with a weird feeling of having stated the obvious.
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Increasingly I believe that there is hardly a correlation between a political group being on a Western 'terror-list', and the probability of whether a member of such a group would do something I found wrong.
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I recall that Morag Kerr had comments on the 'letting Iran off the hook for political expedience'-theory, but right now I don't have access to the book. I think her conclusion was that it didn't really add up.
The timing doesn't fit.
DeleteIt looks to me as if the US authorities wanted to blame Libya from the word go, but the evidence pointing to the PFLP-GC and through them to Iran was so strong they had to back off. However, when the investigators ran into the sand on Malta, being unable to pin a Maltese introduction on anyone connected to the PFLP-GC, the Libyan connection was resurrected, dusted off, and put back into play. The FBI passed the photos of Megrahi to Harry Bell and suggested he might be worth investigating, and the rest is a scandal.