In a speech in Cairo in June 2009 you said:
"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world. One based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition."
"No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust," you said, and speaking of the Palestinians you went on: "For more than 60 years, they have endured the pain of dislocation," but "It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus," ..... "That's not how moral authority is claimed; that's how it is surrendered."
The piece below is written by the father of one of the victims of the Lockerbie disaster of 1988 in which 270 died including children, students, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters and old women, all of them deeply missed, as a result not of a bus, but of an aircraft bombing now widely believed to have been engineered by a group claiming to pursue the interests of those same Palestinians, though centered itself in Syria.
In a recent
YouGov poll in the Muslim world in October 2009, following a debate on Lockerbie held under the auspices of the Qatar foundation, over half the 1047 respondents thought Megrahi (the alleged Lockerbie bomber) innocent, and in a grim reminder of how the US is perceived in the Arab World, whereas 12% thought that Libya was responsible for Lockerbie, 21% thought that the US was 'directly or indirectly responsible'.
So as you Mr President predicted, the impact of your dramatic Cairo speech has not been able to dispel the hatreds and distrust of 60 years. But for 20 of those years a group of families bereaved at Lockerbie have laboured towards obtaining the truth as to why the slaughter happened and who was responsible for it, by default or by commission.
That is why the piece below has been written. The hope is that recognising that some of us wish to see some benefit to the world come out of the horror of the Lockerbie slaughter, may empower a new effort to reach the truth. Maybe disclosing the truth behind the atrocity can actually be turned around to improve relations between the West and the Muslim world, and earn the USA a new respect.
That requires prior certainty as to what the truth actually was.
Those who put their hand up and admit that they previously made mistakes gain respect, those who acquiesce in allowing the truth to remain hidden may come to be despised at the bar of history.
As John Donne wrote : "On a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her, about must, and about must go." (John Donne 1571? - 1631). The piece below is distilled from 20 years of 'going about' in search of the truth, and the path is indeed cragged. On that path we have met with Presidents and dictators, Prime Ministers, a Secretary General of the UN and his foremost legal advisers, and more of the great and the good than can be named here. Perhaps it is worth reading on. I am confident that you want to stand on that hilltop, and that you have the humility to find the path that leads to it.
Dr Jim Swire, father of Flora, age 23 murdered at Lockerbie, 21/12/88The audacity to hope for change. President Obama and the Lockerbie case The truth has a positive contribution to make to US Middle East problems.
When President Obama assumed office a year ago, many thought that the American attitude to those who she regarded as her enemies would become more careful and knowledge based. His compelling writings and oratory supported this hope, as have many of his actions since election. His Nobel prize is a magnificent endorsement of the hope for change which he has brought to office with him.
A new administration, particularly when based on an entirely distinct support base in its own community from that enjoyed by its predecessors, may find it difficult to resolve issues they left over for it to solve. To ease this difficulty a new leader will often co-opt supporters of his preceding administration; at the same time such individuals may make it harder to break with previous ethical norms. The new President's refusal publicly to attack the record of his predecessors can only be admired.
In no field will his task be more difficult than in the conduct of foreign relations, where the support bases of interacting nations will usually not have changed simultaneously, so that previous problems tend to persist. The solution must be for the incoming President to apply a logical re-analysis of how these difficult issues may have arisen, based on the objective re-assessment of the available evidence. This process requires both time and resources, and is finely shown by President Obama's evident careful assessment of the decisions necessary over Afghanistan. But as evidenced by his visit to Cairo in June 2009 and his speech there, nowhere is this more difficult than in relations with the Muslim world.
This re-evaluation process requires even more caution where the work of a nation's intelligence services have been involved, they need to have strong allegiance to the mindset of their current President. This allegiance can lead those intelligence services, in the interests of serving what was their current administration at the time, to overstep the limits which their citizens and their new President would approve, were they aware of them.
True justice should be the great bulwark of citizens the world over against wrongful intrusion into their lives by politicians of their own or any other nation, whether expressed through force or other misuse of power. The Lockerbie trial was of two Libyan individuals, not of the Libyan regime. National justice should protect the rights of its individual citizens, irrespective of the wishes of the politicians and intelligence services of any other nations however relevant to the cases involved, its effectiveness is a measure of the quality of the community it should protect.
For protection at an international level, there are increasing moves towards empowered international justice, such as the International Criminal Court. The US in the past has not pulled her weight there, maybe President Obama will change that. The seeming past belief that US law should run right across the planet causes great resentment.
Almost unnoticed at the time that President Clinton, backed by UK Foreign Secretary (the late) Robin Cook gave the go ahead for the Lockerbie court in Holland, Nelson Mandela issued an urgent warning; speaking from a CHOGM* meeting in Edinburgh he said "No one country should be complainant prosecutor and judge".
The time has now come for the new President to assess whether ignoring the warning from this wise man over this terrible case has led to very unfortunate consequences internationally.
Where several states are all involved in the same case, the danger arises that if one such state is much more powerful than the others, then the protection provided by their own legal systems to those who live in the lesser involved states may be overridden by that power. Intelligence is a form of power. In the Lockerbie case, those who attended the Zeist trial were treated to repeated demonstrations of how some individuals in the Scottish prosecuting authority had developed a sychophantic relationship towards US sources of investigation and technical expertise. Such a relationship gave real meaning to the concept that the UK and the US were indeed to be considered 'one nation' as in Mandela's warning on this matter.
The justice system which President Obama has inherited appears to many observers to be flawed. The mindset of the US Department of Justice, when it boasts of its use of financial inducement to obtain evidence is risky. The US DoJ sports on its website a list of named individuals, allegedly terrorists, who have been brought to 'justice' by the application of financial inducements. There is a fine line between innocent inducement and bribery leading to the perversion of justice. The role of certain Scottish entities in a similar use of 'inducements' also needs investigation.
Megrahi, the alleged Lockerbie bomber is on the DoJ's list of those whose convictions have been assisted by financial inducements to witnesses. It is now known, from records kept by one of the Scottish police force visiting Malta (Harry Bell) that the DoJ wanted to offer $10,000 'up front' with $2,000,000 to follow, to a key prosecution witness, the Maltese clothing-shop keeper, Tony Gauci. This long before he had given his evidence in court. It has not increased faith in the DoJ's probity that Megrahi's name was removed from their front page some time ago after attention was drawn to it by those seeking the truth over Lockerbie.
During the years since Lockerbie, the writer has had the privilege of meeting with Hans Corell, one time under Secretary General and legal Counsel to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, with Nelson Mandela, and with Kofi Annan himself. In addition I have the firm friendship of Professor Robert Black, emeritus professor of Scots law in Edinburgh, whose idea the neutral country Lockerbie trial was, and who, like the writer is convinced that Megrahi should never have been found guilty. There could have been no better tutorial in teaching the need for a better way of resolving international criminal cases based on terrorism and the guilt of individuals.
In the case of the Lockerbie disaster there are compelling reasons for fearing that international political expediency, aided by a litany of pre-existing established patterns of hatred, and serviced by national intelligence services, may have overcome Scotland's hope that she would be able to display to the US and the world an independent but impartial judicial process. International terrorism cases carry a great risk of 'conflict of interest' for national authorities attempting to bring them to justice, for it is the policies of national governments which often decide a terrorist's target, and a nation may well not wish those policies questioned by her own or any other citizens.
Instead it seems inevitable that the truth will out, sooner or later, namely that the Lockerbie trial has deeply undermined the previously high reputation of Scotland's independent criminal justice system, and convicted an individual innocent of the crime with which he had been charged, further bedevilling relations between the West and the Muslim world in the process.
The doubts that exist about the use of the Scottish criminal system in this case keep growing. A number of respected legal authorities, particularly in the UK, such as Scotland's Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC) have come to the conclusion that the verdict against the Libyan, Megrahi, may be unjustified and was politically/economically influenced. Some of these doubts are cogently set out in an article by one of the UK's most prominent champions of true justice and the overturning of improper verdicts, Gareth Peirce.
Any unbiased reader of her
article published in the London Review of Books will see some of the reasons why the Megrahi verdict is being increasingly criticised. Her article does not bear a title dwelling on passive failure of justice but reads 'The framing of Al-Megrahi'.
This title bears witness to the widespread belief that not only was there serious blocking of some material arising from the Scottish investigation, which should certainly have been made known to the defence, but also a naive amateurishness about the acquisition of information concerning at least one potential source of motivation for the crime. There is also deep suspicion that weaknesses were not confined to being so passive as this, for a key piece of the forensic evidence seemed to bear the stamp of deliberate fabrication, aspects of this are discussed below, and need to be set in the context of the quality of the forensic staff involved, both in the UK and in the US.
A few of the reasons for questioning the findings and verdict in the Lockerbie trial. Unfortunately there appears to be a very grave risk that a key piece of forensic evidence, a piece of timer circuit board designated PT35B was fraudulently introduced into the evidence chain and accepted by the British forensic 'experts' who described it to the court. Among all the evidence led, the doubts about the story of this item's alleged recovery and subsequent treatment are unique and gather like vultures round a corpse.
Also unique is the significance that this item would have, if genuine. There was no other physical evidence led capable of giving such support to the prosecution's extraordinary and circumstantial story that the IED had originated from the island of Malta. If true, this story would have required the use of just such a long-running timer as the one from which the fragment called PT35B was alleged to have come, and there simply was no other item which seemed to show that such a timer had been used. The timing of the explosion so early in the Lockerbie aircraft's flight would have been a phenomenal error by any terrorist having complete control over the timing of the explosion. Anyone using a timer such as that from which 'PT35B' was alleged to have come would have had such complete control.
What of involved American intelligence or forensic 'experts'? An agent of the FBI, Thomas Thurman held up in front of public TV cameras in the US a photograph of a pristine timer circuit board through which, he claimed to have linked the crime irrefutably to Libya. It was instantly clear that his photograph was of a circuit board which had not been involved in proximity to any explosion. It was also clearly not the circuit board from which PT35B was said to have come, but was of a separate daughter board adjacent to the PT35B board within such timers.
Before long it became clear (and later confirmed in court evidence) that the CIA had already been in possession of timers containing such circuit boards. The FBI agent Thurman was subsequently cited by a more senior FBI officer for the deliberate distortion of prosecution evidence in other criminal cases, in order to assist the prosecution. He was hastily removed from his position. His Lockerbie related contribution remains in place.
As for his UK counterparts, one was Alan Feraday from RARDE# the comment below on his prior performance in an IRA case cannot be ignored:
"The Crown's chief forensic scientist ... Mr Alan Feraday, upon whom so much depended as to the integrity of his theories and the integrity of himself as an expert witness, has since been severely criticised by the Lord Chief Justice in the case of
R v Berry (1991). Mr. Feraday was brought forward as an expert in electronics. He is only qualified to a Higher National Certificate level. The Lord Chief Justice declared that the nature of his evidence was 'dogmatic in the extreme ' and that he should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in this field. In a recent development the Home Office has agreed to pay out compensation from the public purse to Mr. Berry because he was jailed on the erroneous evidence of Feraday."
The comment of the Lord Chief Justice above was available to those who selected Feraday to handle forensics for the Lockerbie case well before the case opened. Indeed the
R v Berry case cited above occurred in 1991, and it was in December of that year that indictments against the two Libyans were first issued, and the Lockerbie trial did not start till May 2000. At least the FBI did not discover their problems over Thomas Thurman until after he had spoken out over his interpretation of the Lockerbie forensic position.
The problems over Feraday were known to the UK authorities well before they decided to give him a critical role in the Lockerbie forensic determinations. That the above quotation centres on electronics is particularly crucial to the Lockerbie case in view of the unique position of 'PT35B' within it.
Then in an amazing prequel to the Lockerbie case - that of Danny McNamee we see:
"In the course of the investigation [into the McNamee case] documents were discovered which prove that the police and prosecution knew of the existence of Desmond Ellis and that the evidence pointed to him fully 4 years before Mr. McNamee's arrest. They had matched prints in the arms caches to Ellis. In clear breach of their legal responsibilities they deliberately did not disclose this to Mr. McNamee's defence at the 1987 trial or the appeal in 1991.
"During the McNamee case Mr.Alan Feraday, the Crown's main scientific witness, said that 'the two (circuit boards, one found at the bomb site, the other contained in an IRA arms cache) were matched in design 'artwork' and were therefore made by the same master bombmaker.' The circuit board fragment put forward by the Crown as the link between McNamee and an actual explosion was never forensically tested for explosive contamination although other items from the scene of the explosion were subjected to such tests."
The circuit board fragment known as PT35B in the Lockerbie case was never tested by Feraday for explosives residues either.
The writer knows of no evidence that Mr Feraday received any further education in electronics, or the ethics of forensic presentation in criminal trials between 1987 (the McNamee case) and 2000 when he took such a crucial role in the Lockerbie case.
So who authorised the employment of Feraday in the Lockerbie case, and why? Was this really the best our nation could offer in attempting honestly to reach the truth about the worst terrorist outrage ever to occur in the UK?
Why was the Lord Chief Justice's warning about Feraday following the
R v Berry case of 1991 ignored, despite our Home Office having had to make compensation payments because of the findings over Feraday's incompetence at that time?
We now also know that evidence (the Heathrow break-in) supportive of a totally different explanation for the atrocity, and which might have excluded both Megrahi and Malta from the case, was known to the Metropolitan police by January 1989, as Mr Manly of Heathrow security told the appeal court, and recorded in the trial transcripts as follows:
"In January 1989 I was called in for an interview by the anti-terrorist squad. I was interviewed by a Mr. Robson ..."
The prosecuting authorities (Crown Office) have claimed in writing to me that they were unaware of the break-in till after the verdict against Megrahi had been reached 12 years after this 'preventable' disaster. The question here must be whether the prosecuting authorities are correct and whether the break-in was or was not known to the police force (Dumfries and Galloway) charged by the Westminster government of the day with conducting the case, and if not, why did the 'anti terrorist squad', 'Mr Robson' and the Heathrow authorities themselves not pass it on to the investigation?
Remember the words of the Lord Chief justice from 1991? "Mr Feraday was brought forward as an expert in electronics. He is only qualified to a Higher National Certificate level. The Lord Chief Justice declared that the nature of his evidence was 'dogmatic in the extreme ' and that he should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in this field."
Why should the Lockerbie case still be important to President Obama in 2009?President Obama has inherited so many problems, but resolution of the Lockerbie question is not the least of them, despite the many years since the disaster itself.
In a recent
YouGov poll in the Arab world, fieldwork was conducted from the 21st to 25th of October 2009. Over half the 1047 respondents thought Megrahi innocent, and in a grim reminder of how the US is perceived in the Arab World, whereas 12% thought that Libya was responsible for Lockerbie, 21% thought that the US was 'directly or indirectly responsible'.
President Obama will recall no doubt that a previous holder of his office (Ronald Reagan), strongly supported by Lady Thatcher, used the USAF to bomb Tripoli and Bengazi in 1986. Thus it may be that Arab belief in America's responsibility for Lockerbie lies partly in the motivation given to Libya to get revenge for that bombing, which had killed Gaddafi's adopted daughter.
Alternatively a few may also be remembering the destruction of an Iranian airbus with 290 pilgrims on board over the Gulf in July 1988, five months before Lockerbie by a US missile cruiser.
Against this background it would seem logical for the new President to set up a new inquiry into the Lockerbie disaster and particularly into how the verdict against a Libyan came to be reached. It would seem that contributors to such an inquiry would have to be required to give evidence under oath, and that it would be necessary to exercise extreme caution as to how members of the FBI, the CIA and the US Department of Justice should be handled.
In any event if the Lockerbie trial was indeed fatally flawed by the intrusion of international politics then that will be known in the Muslim world, particularly in those nations in which the actual perpetrators and their collaborators are domiciled. These are believed to include Iran and Syria.
If President Obama fails to take all reasonable steps to resolve the doubts surrounding the trial verdict, then he and his country will find it much harder to make progress in reducing tensions in the Middle East, since his country is already suspected of foul play over this case.
If he decides to investigate the case objectively and if that investigation confirms the worst, namely that this was a gross miscarriage of justice, he and his country would surely gain in reputation for integrity and honesty by admitting past mistakes and apologising.
In respect of apologising for miscarriages of justice, there is of course precedent, again provided by the UK.
In February 2005 Prime Minister Tony Blair officially apologised to the families and friends of those falsely convicted over the Guildford and Woolwich IRA bombings. By a twist of fate these tragic miscarriages of justice directly affected America too, for one of those falsely convicted, Paul Hill, had married Caroline Kennedy, daughter of another of President Obama's predecessors in office, President John F Kennedy.
President Obama may consider that the use of those who contributed to the above debacles over IRA cases were again employed in reaching the Lockerbie verdict, dictates a need to re-examine how the Lockerbie verdict came to be reached, even if that process casts painful doubt upon the ethics of involved Americans also.
Why is the Lockerbie trial at Zeist important to the Lockerbie relatives?Since 1989 we have been requesting a full and objective inquiry into the failure to protect the flight, from every single UK Prime MInister, and have been as often rebuffed, usually with the excuse that there was 'an ongoing criminal investigation which must not be compromised', then by the mantra that 'the trial and appeal must take precedence'.
During those long years a Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry (=inquest) was held. It knew nothing of the Heathrow break-in mentioned above, but nevertheless concluded that the disaster was preventable and that the aircraft had been under the Host State protection of the UK while being loaded with its deadly cargo at Heathrow airport.
President Obama will understand at once that we have a need to know why no effective steps were taken by either the US or UK authorities to save those 270 lives. He will find that many of his own country's families who lost loved ones then (but not all of them) believe that justice was done at Zeist. Their sincerity cannot be doubted.
He will find that most of those active in US intelligence in 1988 will swear that they worked with integrity to reach the trial verdict in 2001. No doubt most of them did. But for those of us who cannot believe that more should not have been done to provide protection, and those who believe that the Zeist verdict was a disgrace, there seems a poisonous miasma of deceit choking the truth over just why and by whom our beloved families were left innocent, vulnerable and then were brutally slaughtered. It is a dilemma which embraces both our nations, so the new President will need to approach our current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, also, if a comprehensive inquiry is to be realised.
This we have of course done, both individually and as a group, but without even a reply to the group's request at the time of writing.
Yes it is hard to question the 'closure' obtained for many by the Zeist verdict, but eventually the truth will come out, and then what will those who have contributed to this terrible deception have to say to us?
We should all remember that 'it is only necessary for good men to do nothing, for evil to triumph'. Some of us believe that honest re-appraisal of this dreadful case could be a force for integrity and the benefit of humanity, whereas the present deceit poisons international relations and makes the work of the great, such as President Obama, all the more difficult.
In the interests of integrity, truth and the healing of past mistakes Mr President I believe you should give this tragedy your attention.
In the name of human love and family rejoice that it did not afflict you or your lovely family, may terrorism never do so. But surely at this time of year especially we know in our hearts that the way to defeat terrorism is by handling perpetrators with firmness, yes, but also with fairness and true justice and eschewing the natural human urge to seek revenge? It is sometimes possible to wrest something good even out of something profoundly evil. Surely this case now offers just that.
Dr Jim Swire, father of Flora, murdered at Lockerbie, and a seeker after truth. 20th December 2009* CHOGM Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
# RARDE Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment.
~ The research was conducted using YouGovSiraj’s regional online panel of 200,000+ respondents. Respondents from across the region (Arab world) were invited to participate in the survey. Fieldwork was conducted from the 21st to 25th of October 2009. The poll was completed during the third week of October by more than 1,000 respondents from 18 Arab countries.Over half – 55 percent - of those interviewed cast doubt on Al Megrahi's conviction for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.
