Trial of kidnapped Libyan could unravel entire US Lockerbie bombing narrative

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Mustafa Fetouri published in the current issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It reads in part:]

Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, 74, a Libyan national, appeared in a federal court in Washington, DC, on Dec 12, 2022, charged in connection with the bombing that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland while flying from London to New York.

 According to US prosecutors, Mas’ud made the bomb that blew up the plane on Dec 21, 1988, killing 270, including 11 people on the ground. Two other Libyans have been tried for the same crime: Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted while his co-accused Lamin Fahima was acquitted in 2001. Al-Meghrahi protested his innocence until his 2012 death from prostate cancer in his Tripoli home. In fact, his conviction was widely criticized by the legal community and by United Nations observer Hans Kochler, who cited “foreign governmental and intelligence interference in the presentation of evidence.” 

Mas’ud’s kidnapping and subsequent “extradition” to the US started in the poor suburb of Abu Salim, south of the Libyan capital Tripoli, where armed militias roam freely. 

On the night of Nov 16, 2022, Mas’ud was getting ready for bed when half a dozen unmarked cars pulled up in front of his home. Four masked and armed men forced their way into his bedroom, dragged him out in his pajamas, shoved him into one of the cars and drove away. One of the masked men told the small crowd that quickly formed in the street that Mas’ud would be back soon. Abdel Moneim Al-Maryami, the family’s spokesman and Ma’sud’s nephew, described the shock for onlookers who “watched helplessly.” 

That evening Mas’ud had just returned from his third visit to the hospital in a week. The septuagenarian suffers from a host of illnesses made worse during his decade-long incarceration in the notorious Al-Hadba prison in Tripoli, accused of preparing car bombs in Libya’s 2011 civil war. The US Justice Department alleges that Mas’ud first confessed to making the Lockerbie bomb in Al-Hadba prison, but the former director of that prison, Khalid Sharif, denies that Mas’ud ever made such a confession while he was there. Sharif, now living in exile in Turkey, was one of the top leaders of the organization known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. In 2004 the US listed this Afghanistan-based group as terrorists but unlisted it in 2015 after it participated in the 2011 US-NATO supported armed revolt that toppled former leader Muammar Qaddafi’s government.

The following morning the family started searching for Mas’ud, a daunting task because different militias have different detention centers. After a week and multiple visits to the headquarters of different militias, the offices of the prime minister and the prosecutor general, and different detention centers around Tripoli, Abdel Moneim was told where he was and allowed to visit him. 

In detention Mas’ud told his visitors that nobody “interrogated him,” let alone explained why he was detained or by whom. Family members continued visiting until one day his son, Essam, went for a visit but was told his father had been taken to Misrata, some 186 miles (300 km) east of Tripoli. “He was handed over” to Joint Force, a notorious and powerful militia, Essam said. 

No one mentioned the idea of handing him over to the US. In fact, Essam said, “they assured us that he was being kept there for his own safety.” Other family members had filed a kidnapping report with the police. Government officials denied knowing anything about the kidnapping. The prosecutor general denied issuing an arrest warrant and promised to investigate the matter. 

Mas’ud made headlines on Dec 21, 2020, the 32nd anniversary of the bombing, when then-US Attorney General William Barr accused him of assembling the bomb and handing it over to Al-Megrahi in Malta. 

Libyan laws do not permit the extradition of its citizens to stand trial abroad, and it has no extradition treaty with the US. In a BBC interview in 2021, Libya’s US-educated foreign minister, Najla El-Mangoush, said her government was “open” to the idea of extraditing suspect Mas’ud but “within the law.” Faced with a huge public outcry, El-Mangoush denied that she ever said she was open to Mas’ud’s extradition, forcing the BBC to release the video clip of the interview in which she made that claim.

The US and Libyan governments knew that Mas’ud could not legally be transferred to the US so they colluded with Joint Force, a militia loyal to Tripoli’s government, to grab him.

Just before midday on Dec 11, 2022, some Pan Am Flight 103 victims’ families received an “urgent update” email from the Scottish authorities updating them on their efforts to prosecute Mas’ud. The message’s closing line said the US “has obtained custody” of him. 

I was in Paris, waiting for news because a friend had already alerted me to expect some. His family first heard the news from me after I spoke to their spokesman Abdel Moneim that morning.

On Dec 12, Mas’ud limped into Judge Robin Meriweather’s DC courtroom where he told the judge that he “cannot talk” before meeting his attorney. A day later, a Libyan businessman told me that he was ready to fund a defense team. But appointing the right defense team thousands of miles away is not an easy task for his family who are still in shock and confused by the conflicting advice they are getting from friends and volunteers trying to help them. 

The fact that he was kidnapped should be reason enough to halt any further legal proceedings against him. But the US has a history of kidnapping suspects and sending them for interrogation to countries that use torture liberally. 

On two previous occasions, US commandos kidnapped suspects from Libya to try them in the US. Ahmed Abu Khatallah,  was kidnapped in 2014, and tried and convicted in the US for participating in the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. In 2013 Abu Anas al-Libi was snatched and taken to US for trial accused of planning the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He died of cancer in custody days before his trial. For this third kidnapping the US outsourced the dirty work to a local militia.

The news that Mas’ud had been kidnapped was condemned by Libya’s parliament, High Council of State (a consultative body), the national security adviser and the minister of justice. They also warned that handing him over to the US would be illegal and an infringement of Libyan sovereignty. However, none of them knew exactly what happened, and Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Debeibeh kept silent. The uproar was repeated when Mas’ud was reported to have been sent to the US.

The public reaction has been supportive of Mas’ud and critical of the government in Tripoli. In a clumsy televised speech, Debeibeh attempted some damage control but instead made things worse. He said that “this man [Mas’ud] killed 270 innocent souls in cold blood,” but did not provide any evidence. Most Libyans mocked him and asked whether more Libyans would be sent to the US for Lockerbie bombing trials. 

Rumors of more extraditions of Libyans intensified in the wake of a Jan. 12, 2023 unannounced visit of CIA Director William Burns. (...)

A second Lockerbie bombing trial is very unlikely. US prosecutors will try to avoid such a scenario because it could lead to re-examining the whole Lockerbie trial evidence of 2001, as well as evidence that has emerged since Al-Megrahi’s conviction. Doing so could unravel the entire case and cast serious doubts about the evidence used to convict Al-Megrahi 22 years ago and raise questions about Libya’s responsibility for the bombing.

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the bombing and now represents UK victims’ families, argues that the United Nations, not the US, should try Mas’ud. He said “no one country can be the plaintiff, the prosecutor and the judge” in this case. His compatriot, law professor Robert Black, thinks Mas’ud can still “get a fair trial” in a US court. The professor believes that US prosecutors must prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Mas’ud made the device that destroyed the jumbo jet on that cold December night in 1988, that his bomb, and no other, caused the disaster and that Mas’ud knew that his bomb would be used for that purpose.

Professor Black, the primary figure behind the previous Lockerbie bombing trial in Camp Zeist under Scots law in The Netherlands, thinks it is not “essential” for US prosecutors to show how the bomb got on the plane in order to get a conviction. In such a scenario the evidence to convict Mas’ud will rest, heavily, on the analysis of the fragment of circuit board that the US claims was part of the timer that set the bomb off in midair. That tiny fragment, US investigators claim, was found in a Scottish field where debris from the plane was scattered. However, since that first Lockerbie trial, evidence has emerged demonstrating that the fragment was actually planted to frame Libya.

George Thompson, a former Scottish police officer turned private investigator, who has worked extensively on the case, claims to have the evidence to show exactly that. Thompson told me that he is ready to be a witness in the upcoming US trial, whenever that might be.

If convicted, Mas’ud is certain to face life imprisonment. In his first court appearance on Dec 12, prosecutors told him that they will not be seeking the death penalty. US former Attorney General Barr, in a BBC interview published the next day, said Mas’ud should receive the death penalty. Barr also said that Mas’ud’s alleged confession, should be admissible in court, despite concerns by others that it may have been coerced. 

Mas’ud’s trial could take months to start and weeks to end. Regardless of the outcome, most Libyans believe it will not bring us any closer to the truth about Lockerbie.

The search for justice goes on and William Barr's actions are unlikely to help

[This is part of the headline over a long article by Kim Sengupta in The Independent. It reads in part:]

With great fanfare, on the anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, the US has announced charges against the supposed bomb maker who blew up Pan Am flight 103, the worst act of terrorism in this country, with 270 lives lost.  

One of William Barr’s final acts as Donald Trump’s Attorney General, a deeply controversial tenure, is supposed to fit one of the final pieces of the jigsaw in the hunt for the killers.  

There are historic links between the Lockerbie investigation and the current, turbulent chapter of American politics. Barr was also the Attorney General in 1991, in the George W Bush administration, when charges were laid against two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, over the bombing. The inquiry was led at the time by Robert Mueller, the head of the Department of Justice’s criminal division.  

Mueller, of course, became the Special Counsel who examined if Trump was the Muscovian candidate for the White House. Barr was the Attorney General, in his second term in the post, accused of distorting the findings of Mueller’s report to protect Trump from accusations of obstruction of justice, which he denies.  

The charges which have been laid against Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, another Libyan, are intrinsically connected to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is the only person to have been found guilty by a court of the bombing.  

Megrahi is now dead. There are good reasons to hold that the investigation, trial and verdict which brought his conviction were flawed and a miscarriage of justice has taken place. This is a view shared by bereaved families, international jurists, intelligence officers and journalists who had followed the case.  

Last month, an appeal hearing began at the High Court in Edinburgh to posthumously clear Megrahi’s name. This was the third appeal in the attempt to prove that the verdict against him was unsound, with his legal team focusing on the veracity of the prosecution evidence at his trial. 

Much of the case against Masud, a former Libyan intelligence officer, now charged, comes from an alleged confession he made in jail, where he had ended up after the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Masud, according to the FBI, named Megrahi and Fhimah as co-conspirators, who had together manufactured an explosive device using Semtex during a trip to Malta. Masud has said that he had bought the clothing which had been wrapped around the bomb, hidden in a radio-cassette player, before being placed in a Samsonite suitcase which was put on the flight.  

There are two points which are immediately relevant. The same trial which convicted Megrahi had acquitted Fhimah of all charges. And one of the key allegations against Megrahi, which the judges said made them decide on the verdict of guilt, was that it was he who had bought the clothing put around the explosive device.  

These contradictions are among many, big and small, which have marked the official narrative presented by the US and UK authorities of what lay behind the downing of the airliner.  

I went to Lockerbie on the night of the bombing, attended the trial of the two Libyan defendants, and met Megrahi at his home in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, where he had been allowed to return after suffering from cancer. I have followed the twists and turns of the case throughout.   

Soon after the downing of the Pan Am flight, American and British security officials began laying the blame on an Iran-Syria axis. The scenario was that Tehran had taken out a contract in revenge for the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, which had been shot down by missiles fired from an American warship, the USS Vincennes, a few months earlier. The theory went that the contract had been taken up by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which specialised in such operations.  

But the blame switched to Libya, then very much a pariah state, around the time Iran and Syria joined the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. Robert Baer, the former American intelligence officer and author, was among those who held that the Iranian sponsored hit was the only plausible explanation for the attack. This was the firm belief held “to a man”, he stated, by his former colleagues in the CIA.  

After years of wrangling, Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Airlines and allegedly in the Libyan security service, and Fhimah, allegedly a fellow intelligence officer, were finally extradited in 1999. (...)

The two men were charged with joint enterprise and conspiracy. Yet only Megrahi was found guilty. (...)

So, deprived of finding a partner in crime for Megrahi, the prosecutor switched to claiming, and the judges accepting, that he had conspired with himself.  

The prosecution evidence was circumstantial; details of the bomb timer on the plane were contradictory; and the testimony of a key witness, a Maltese shopkeeper, extremely shaky under cross-examination. Five years on from the trial, the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmville – who had been responsible for initiating the Lockerbie prosecution – described the witness, Tony Gauci, as “an apple short of a picnic” and “not quite the full shilling”. Gauci was, however, flush in dollars: the Americans paid him for his testimony.  

The performance and evidence of a supposedly prime “CIA intelligence asset”, Abdul Majid Giaka, codenamed “Puzzle Piece” who turned up in a Shirley Bassey wig, was widely viewed as risible. It emerged later that important evidence had not been passed on to the defence lawyers. Ulrich Lumpert, an engineer who testified to the validity of a key piece of evidence, admitted later in an affidavit of lying to the court.  

It has also emerged that Giaka had been described by his CIA handler, John Holt, in an official report as someone who had a “history of making up stories”.

Holt was denied permission to appear at court. Earlier this month he reiterated in an interview that, like his CIA colleagues, he believes the Libyan connection was a concocted red herring and culpability lay with PFLP (GC). "I would start by asking the current Attorney General, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also Attorney General, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans”, he said.  

The observer for the UN at the trial, Hans Kochler severely criticised the verdict. Writing later in The Independent, he described a case based on “circumstantial evidence”; the “lack of credibility” of key prosecution witnesses who “had incentives to bear false witness against Megrahi”; the fact that one was paid cash by the Americans; and that “so much key information was withheld from the trial”.    

Robert Black, a law professor born in Lockerbie, who played an important role in organising the Camp Zeist proceedings, later became convinced that a great injustice had taken place, as have many other eminent jurists.  

Some who were in Lockerbie on that terrible night and dealt with the aftermath also felt the same way. Father Patrick Keegans, the parish priest at the time, joined the “Justice for Megrahi” campaign after meeting the convicted man’s family and has backed appeals to clear his name.  

Many members of the bereaved families feel that justice has not been done, among them Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing and became a spokesman for “UK Families 103”.  

When there were objections to the severely ill Megrahi being allowed to return to Tripoli, he pointed out “the scandal around Megrahi is not that a sick man was released, but that he was even convicted in the first place. All I have ever wanted to see is that the people who murdered my daughter are brought to justice.”  

After the charging of Masud, Dr Swire said: “I'm all in favour of whatever he's got to tell us being examined in a court, of course I am. The more people who look at the materials we have available the better.”  

He wanted to stress: “There are only two things that we seek, really. One is the question of why those lives were not protected in view of all the warnings and the second is: what does our government and the American government really know about who is responsible for murdering them.”  

Some bereaved families have criticised the presentation and motivation of the US move. The State Department had sent an invitation for livestreaming of the event.  

Reverend John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, said the “timing and particularly the choice of this specific day, which is special to many of us, to be bizarre, disrespectful, insensitive and extremely ill considered”. He added: “Why exactly, when the Attorney General is about to leave office, has he waited 32 years to bring charges?”  

Behind the controversy over who carried out the attack, the political manoeuvres and legal actions, lay the human tragedy of Lockerbie, a scene which is difficult to forget, even after three decades, for many of us who went there.  (...)

There is also the memory of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, at his home in Tripoli in 2012. He lay in his bed attached to a drip, on red sheets stained by dark splashes of blood he had coughed up. An oxygen mask covered his skeletal face; his body twitched as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was in the advanced stages of cancer: medicine he desperately needed had been plundered by looters; the doctors who had been treating him had fled. He died a few months later.  

The bitter accusations and recriminations over Lockerbie are unlikely to cease. But the search for justice for this terrible act of violence which took so many lives, and caused so much pain and grief, continues to remain elusive among the secrets and lies. 

We should be proud of Al-Megrahi’s doctors

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Jim Swire that appeared in the British Medical Journal on this date in 2010:]

In December 1988 a Boeing 747 was destroyed by a bomb in a baggage container in its hold at 9500m over Lockerbie, 38 minutes after leaving Heathrow, where it had been loaded from empty. The criminal investigation was placed in the hands of the United Kingdom’s smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway.

By May 2000 the investigation, following the lead of a random selection of clothing found at the crash site and originating in Malta, believed that the bomb had also entered the aviation chain there, aboard an Air Malta flight, placed by Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, a Libyan. A trial began at Zeist, near Utrecht.

Despite Air Malta’s denials of being the initial carrier, reinforced by substantial payments to them from a UK television company that had repeated that story on air, and despite the lack of any evidence in court as to how Al-Megrahi was supposed to have breached security at Luqa airport in Malta, he was found guilty. Then on the failure of his first appeal in Zeist in 2002 he was transferred to a Scottish prison.

Only during that first appeal was it revealed that, unlike at Luqa, where there was no evidence of any failure of security, the perimeter at Heathrow had been broken through the night before Lockerbie, close to where the container, in which the bomb exploded, was loaded. No effort had been made to discover the intruder or their motivation, despite the immediate logging of the “incident” by Heathrow staff.

There was no jury in the appeal; amazingly the verdict still stood. The official United Nations observer, Hans Kochler of Vienna; the Scottish law professor Robert Black of Edinburgh; and many others, including me (I attended at Zeist throughout) doubt that the verdict should have been reached. In Scotland, too, public opinion is deeply divided.

In view of these and other remarkable weaknesses in the trial it was little surprise when the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission decided in 2007, after four years’ delay, that the whole thing may have been a miscarriage of justice and referred the case back for a second appeal.

By August 2009 Al-Megrahi, now aged 57, was gravely ill and in pain. It was widely known that he had metastatic prostate cancer, with substantial skeletal secondaries. Under a precedent in Scottish law that terminally ill patients could be granted “compassionate release” if they were believed to have only a few months to live, Al-Megrahi—who still proclaimed his innocence—was released to his home in Tripoli by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice secretary.

There were shouts of fury from those who had not looked at the evidence for themselves. Some of these were the same voices who had urged that analgesics should be withheld from the suffering prisoner; one wrote to me that he hoped Al-Megrahi’s death would be a long drawn out agony.

MacAskill had taken the advice of the prison medical service in Greenock prison, which in turn had called in two Scottish consultants; and he was also advised by a prominent professor of oncology. This oncologist was apparently accompanied by two other, English, doctors. I understand that all doctors involved conferred before advising MacAskill that a likely prognosis for Al-Megrahi was about three months.

But two major changes have taken place since then. Firstly, Al-Megrahi has been returned to his own country and is with his own loving family. We know that a major reduction in stress will sometimes induce a major remission, even in a terrible progressive illness such as his.

Secondly, he has undergone a course of treatment in Tripoli with one of the taxol series of drugs, together with palliative radiotherapy. These can be associated with remissions of many months. Presumably they had not been given in Scotland, for some reason.

Now that he has survived for seven months, allegations are appearing in the media that this man’s illness was fabricated or at least exaggerated for some political or economic motive and that the doctors must have been “bought.”

My own medical knowledge of the case is confined to meeting Al-Megrahi in prison and observing his physical decline and is without any professional involvement, except for discussion with the oncologist. Nevertheless I wish to support the advice that my distinguished medical colleagues gave to MacAskill. BMJ readers will be able to confirm that the two major changes in Al-Megrahi’s circumstances might well explain the dramatic and welcome improvement in his condition.

In any case, “How long have I got, doc?” was never a question to which I knew a precise answer as a GP; seldom are a doctor’s humanity and tact more tested.

The prognosis delivered by our doctors in this fraught case helped to precipitate a major crisis in the UK-US alliance, in which President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both to express their great displeasure. But by sticking to their patient oriented professional duty, the doctors contributed to a major relief for a dying man. We should be proud of them.

When I last met this quiet and dignified Muslim in his Greenock cell he had prepared a Christmas card for me. On it he had written, “To Doctor Swire and family, please pray for me and my family.” It is a treasured possession by which I shall always remember him. Even out of such death and destruction comes a message of hope and reconciliation for Easter.

Politics and justice: the Lockerbie trial

[On this date in 2008, a transcript was published on the website of ABC Australia of a radio programme broadcast in September the previous year. The transcript reads as follows:]

Keri Phillips: This is ABC Radio National. Keri Phillips here with Rear Vision.

Newsreader: In what could be one of the world's worst air disasters, a Pan Am jumbo jet has crashed into a small village in Southern Scotland.

Reporter: It hit a petrol station in the centre of the town of Lockerbie. Police say there are many casualties.

Man: We initially heard a rumbling over the hotel. We thought the roof was falling in, and then we heard a tremendous shudder on the ground, as though it was an earthquake.

Keri Phillips: Two hundred and seventy people died when Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, a few nights before Christmas in 1988. Although sabotage was not immediately assumed, once the cause was identified as a bomb planted inside a cassette player, suspicions fell initially on a Syrian-backed group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command - the PFLP-GC, possibly acting for Iran, which had threatened revenge for the mistaken American downing of an Iran Air passenger plane a few months earlier. But by the time anyone was charged over Lockerbie, it was two Libyan men who were indicted in 1991. Negotiations between Libya and the US and the UK over how the trial would proceed took years, but finally in 2001, one of the men, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was found guilty of placing the suitcase containing the bomb on the plane and he is now serving a life sentence in a prison near Glasgow. Recently however, after mounting disquiet over the original finding, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has decided to refer Megrahi's case to the High Court, a step it takes in cases where it believes there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Today on Rear Vision, we'll look at what happened at the original trial and hear from three men who are relieved that Megrahi will finally have a chance for a proper appeal against his conviction.

Robert Black, QC, is the former Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. It was he who proposed that a non-jury trial under Scottish law be held at a neutral venue in the Netherlands.

Robert Black: Normally, trial for a major crime in Scotland like murder, would be before a single judge, sitting with a jury of 15 people. Now the Libyan defence team were not convinced that their clients could get a fair trial before an ordinary Scottish jury of 15 people. There had been so much advance publicity about the Lockerbie affair and much of that advance publicity simply assumed as true the government contentions about who was responsible for the atrocity, namely these two Libyan men, and it was in that context that I came up with the idea of having a trial under Scottish procedure, but without a jury. And also because they were worried about the physical safety of their citizens if they were tried in Scotland, I also suggested that perhaps the trial should be held in a neutral country, like the Netherlands. And so that was the basis upon which I put forward the original proposal, and the Libyan government and the Libyan defence team accepted that proposal within hours of my formally submitting it to them in writing.

But then there was a delay of about four and a half years until the government of Britain and indeed the government of the United States consented to it, largely because they didn't want to be seen for public relations purposes, to be making any concessions to Libya. Libya was a rogue state, a pariah State, and the attitude of Britain and America that there had to be an ordinary trial either in Scotland or in the United States, simply meant that there never would be a trial at all. And eventually after a long time, I think Britain and America realised that.

Reporter: In Tripoli there was much ceremony when in front of 40 Libyan and Arab and South African diplomats, the two men were handed over to the UN's Chief Legal officer, Hans Korel. Wearing business suits and flashing victory signs, Megrahi and Fahima looked confident as they boarded the special UN flight to Holland.

Keri Phillips: Attention had switched to Libya after the first Gulf War, when, some suggest, Iran became an important Western ally. For those who'd lost loved ones, the beginning of the trial in 2000 was a relief, although some were mystified that the responsibility had been shifted from Iran to Libya. Jim Swire lost his 24-year-old daughter, Flora, on Pan Am 103.

Jim Swire: We had had meetings with politicians in all sorts of different countries in Cairo and in Britain and Libya, including three visits to see Colonel Gaddafi himself, and once the indictments were issued, it was an extraordinary event, because we knew that up until that point the criminal investigation had been presuming that Iran was behind it, because she had the strong motive of having had her airbus shot down two months before by the Americans, and that the Syrian terrorist group had been the executives because they were known to have the technology that fitted perfectly for what had happened.

That was the basis behind my thinking at the time. But we had been told also by a chap called Douglas Hogg who was No.2 to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hird in Britain at the time, that there was no evidence against any nation other than Libya, and we knew that that statement simply wasn't true, and we couldn't find ourselves believing what we were told. So my position was that I needed the court case to confirm to me that what the politicians were telling me, which was that of course it was a Libyan job from beginning to end, what are you worrying about? I hoped that the court would confirm that. In fact, the court had exactly the opposite effect. I went into the court thinking these just be the guilty guys who blew up my poor daughter, and I came out of thinking Well these clearly were not the guys, so who the heck was it who did do it and why am I being mistakenly led to believe that these two were responsible when clearly they weren't.

Robert Black: Many outside observers, including myself, couldn't actually understand the reason for this shift in attitude, because I have seen the official minutes of the investigation into Lockerbie, and it is perfectly plain from those official minutes that the investigators at that time were convinced that they had the solution to Lockerbie, and it had nothing to do with Libya and it had everything to do with the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian group. But suddenly, and for no good reason that I can see, the focus of attention changed.

Keri Phillips: Robert Black, who'd continued to take a close interest in the case, says that during the trial the weakness of the evidence against Libya was revealed.

Robert Black: The evidence that was led by the prosecution was much as I think followers of the affair had anticipated. So there were no, I think, real surprises in the prosecution case. But what I think did come as a surprise to some people was how weak some of that evidence turned out to be, particularly the evidence linking Mr Megrahi with Malta, and with the purchase of the clothes which surrounded the bomb. Now these clothes were purchased, so the Crown contended, in a particular shop in Malta. And one of the main planks of the prosecution case against Megrahi was to establish that he was the person who had bought those clothes in that shop in Malta. I think it was partly the problem of the witness, the shopkeeper who actually sold the clothes. He never actually came out and positively said 'I identify Abdel Bassett Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes in my shop.' The most that he would say and the most that he ever said in the run-up to the trial, and in the trial itself, was that Megrahi resembled a lot the person who bought the clothes.

But he had also, in the past, given descriptions of the person who came into the shop and bought these clothes. And that description did not in any way tie up with the physical appearance of Megrahi. For example, in his first statement to the police, the shopkeeper said, 'The person who came into my shop and bought the clothes was over 6-feet tall and was more than 50 years of age'. Now Abdel Basset Megrahi at the relevant time was 36 years old, and was 5-feet 8-inches tall. This came out at the trial. The judges accepted that the shopkeeper effectively had identified Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes, which he never did. And as I say, most neutral, unbiased observers thought that that was an absolutely perverse decision by the judges on the evidence which had been led in court. If it had not been that the court wrongly, in my view, accepted that it had been established that Megrahi was the person who bought the clothes in Malta, there would have been no justification whatever for convicting him. There really wasn't any other significant evidence at all against Megrahi.

Keri Phillips: Today's program is revisiting the conviction of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, after a Scottish Judicial Commission has decided that there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Reporter: After such an exhaustive trial the verdict in the case against the two Libyan men charged with blowing up Pan Am flight 103, was something of a surprise. Hopes were high but few people really expected a conviction. In the end though, the three Scottish judges agreed that the prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubt that one of them, Abdel Basset ali-Mohamed al-Megrahi was the man who planted the bomb.

Keri Phillips: Professor Black says that one of the other mysterious aspects of the case is that only one of the Libyans was found guilty.

Robert Black: This is very, very surprising, isn't it, because the basis of the Crown's case against the Libyans was that Megrahi was the brains behind the plot. The bag-carrier if you like was Fahima, the other accused. But the importance of Fahima in the Crown scenario, the Crown explanation of Lockerbie was that Fahima was the one who had the ability to get the case containing the bomb into the airline baggage handling system, because Fahima was the station chief of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, and he was the one, according to the Crown, who could arrange for the suitcase containing the bomb, to be transported as unaccompanied baggage from Malta to Frankfurt, then from Frankfurt to Heathrow and at Heathrow then to be laden on to Pan Am 103. So that was Fahima's role. He wasn't the brains, but he was a necessary instrument in getting this bomb into the airline baggage handling system as unaccompanied baggage.

Now when the trial court held that there was not actually sufficient evidence to show that Fahima had done any of these things, that left an enormous gap in the Crown case, because they now could not provide an explanation of how this suitcase containing the bomb actually got into the interline baggage transfer system at all, because if Fahima wasn't responsible for it, there was no other explanation. So many people thought it's absolutely amazing that the person who supposedly was the one who actually sent this piece of baggage on its fatal journey, once he's out of the picture, how on earth are you still able to convict the other man?

Keri Phillips: Professor Hans Köchler is a specialist in political and legal philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. He was appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to attend the trial as an observer for the United Nations.

Hans Köchler: In brief, the trial was in both phases, the trial itself, plus the first appeal from 2001 to 2002, both of the proceedings were not fair, there was a lot of political interference, and as I said, at the end of the appeal, I suspected a miscarriage of justice. That means specifically I was of the view that the person who was declared guilty may be the wrong person, that this man who was now sitting in a Scottish jail, may not be guilty as charged.

Keri Phillips: You said that there was political interference; can you spell out for us what kind of political interference there was?

Hans Köchler: To some extent one can spell it out. Of course most of this goes on behind the scenes, but as an observer who is alert to some extent, I noticed and I was the first to make it public, the presence of representatives of foreign governments in the court room interacting during court sessions with the Prosecution team and the Defence team respectively. The one country I refer to is the United States, the other country is Libya. It is totally irregular because that was a Scottish court, and there were two officials of the United States Department of Justice who interacted with the Prosecution team and there was one Libyan lawyer who officially was a kind of adviser of the Defence team, but in fact was a Libyan official. He's deceased by now and he of course interacted with the Defence team. There was absolutely no point if this is a Scottish court, why there should be people representing a foreign governmental interest, first of all sitting next to either Defence or Prosecution in the court room while the court is on session. And secondly, why during the session they should interact with the official actors of the trial. Both of these groups of people should have been placed together with us, the international observers, behind the bulletproof glass wall. That was the place where the observers of the United States Embassy and of the Libyan Embassy were also seated.

Jim Swire: What I do know is that were circumstances surrounding the trial which one can just credibly say may have misled the judges. And those are things like the fact that the body of the evidence was essentially obtained and offered up by intelligence services in the West, particularly of course the CIA and the FBI. And intelligence services are not known as seekers after truth. If they're doing their job properly they will be doing what they believe is in the interests of the country for which they work, and that may or may not coincide with the truth. I think that's fairly self-evident. So that's the first thing. The real powers behind the assembly of evidence were not uninvolved, objective-minded people, they were people who had a job to do, and I think that at Zeist we saw them doing it.

Another thing was that I felt very uncomfortable; there were members of the US State Department in court who appeared to me during the actual hearings to be coaching one or two of the witnesses, by giving the very slightest of nods to indicate that he should answer yes to that question during the proceedings. And to have powerful representatives of the accusing power present in full view of the witnesses and apparently acting in that way, was totally and utterly unacceptable I think. And I think in this context we should remember what the great Nelson Mandela said to us and had published just before President Clinton gave the go-ahead for the trial in the first place, Nelson Mandela went public and told everyone No one country should be complainant, prosecutor, and judge. But if you take the UK and the USA as acting as one entity in this issue, the UK and the USA were the complainants, the prosecutor and really they were the judges.

Robert Black: I think that consciously or subconsciously, these judges appreciated that if neither of the two Libyan accused were convicted in this trial, this would be an enormous embarrassment to the Prosecution system in Scotland. And the person in charge of the Prosecution system in Scotland is an officer called the Lord Advocate.

Now the Lord Advocate is roughly like the Attorney-General in English and English-based legal systems, but in Scotland the Lord Advocate actually was a much more important figure in the legal system, even than Attorneys-General are in English and English-based legal systems, because he was actually at the very head of the criminal justice system. Not only was he the Prosecutor, he was also the person who nominated judges for appointment to the bench.

Every judge in Scotland at the time of the Lockerbie trial had achieved his or her position on the bench through being nominated for appointment by the Lord Advocate. There are those and some of these people are in high positions in Libya, who think that there was overt political pressure placed upon the judges to reach a conclusion that was satisfactory to the British and American governments over Lockerbie.

I myself don't actually believe that the British government or the American government in any way tried to influence the judges to reach a politically acceptable decision. I really do believe that the reason for Lockerbie and what I am convinced was a perverse decision to convict Megrahi is to do with internal Scottish legal politics. It distresses me because I've been a part of the Scottish justice system now for 35 years as an advocate, as a part-time judge, as a teacher of law and procedure, and it actually came as a shock to me that something within the Scottish criminal justice system could go so badly wrong. I mean even the best-regulated system can make mistakes and we accept that, and that's why you've got appeal courts, to put these mistakes right. But Lockerbie was more than that.

Lockerbie brought home to me as I don't think any other case could have done, that actually there is something wrong in the system. It's not just a one-off mistake, there was actually something (I hesitate to use the word, but I think it's justified) there was actually something rotten about the system. And as I say, as somebody who's been involved in that system in one capacity or another for 35 years, I found that personally very distressing.

Keri Phillips: Some, like Daniel Cohen, an American who lost his 20-year-old daughter, Theodora, in the explosion, remain convinced that Libya was responsible, but for Jim Swire:

Jim Swire: What I would like to come out of this is first and foremost no more delays; I think Megrahi should be sent home and his verdict should quashed. I as an individual think that he as an individual deserves that, a profuse apology and compensation and so on for what happened to him as a result of what I believe to have been a deeply flawed trial. But the other thing is, that will leave of course the world saying OK, well if those guys didn't do it, then who did? And trying to divine what the vibes are telling me that I pick up, I mean there are some very professional people involved in the run-up to the next appeal who quite rightly won't tell me things that professionally they shouldn't tell me.

But I divine that there is now new evidence concerning the Lockerbie case, which will point us strongly in the correct direction, whatever that may be. I think it'll be Iran and Syria, but whatever that direction may turn out to be, I think incidentally it could also be Egypt, but that's another issue. But wherever it does point us, I think it will give us a helping hand towards discovering the truth, and all we've asked for over the past 18 years in this context is truth and justice, and so far I think we've had neither and I think that we will be asking very serious question about why we have been kept at arm's length and denied the truth for 18 years.

Robert Black: I know that people like Dr Jim Swire who have never been convinced of Megrahi's guilt, even after sitting through the whole of the trial and listening to all of the evidence, their view has been all right, we think an innocent man was convicted and we will fight to get him released. But I think their motivation was largely to the effect that until we get this miscarriage of justice rectified, there will always be a blockage in our path towards finding out the truth about Lockerbie, because every time we say to governments Hold an inquiry into what happened at Lockerbie, the government says we don't need to. We've had a trial and a man's been convicted. We know what happened at Lockerbie. Why are you asking for an inquiry?

So to people like Jim Swire you've got to get the blockage caused by Megrahi's conviction removed, and then you can go back to government and say OK, now what reason can you come up with for not holding an inquiry into Lockerbie? And so I think that's part of Jim Swire's motivation, and I support him in that, but I honestly don't think that even if we have an inquiry, that will lead with any certainty to a conclusion as to who was responsible. It may point in certain directions but I personally now think too much time has passed and that we will never actually get an answer that beyond reasonable doubt convinces everyone this is what happened at Lockerbie.

Keri Phillips: And it may take a year before Megrahi's case will be heard in a Scottish appeal court.

If you'd like to find out more about this story, do go to the Rear Vision website. I've put a link to Professor Kochler's Lockerbie website there and you can find his reports to the UN, the court judgments and a lot of other articles on the trial.

Technical producer for today's Rear Vision is Jenny Parsonage. I'm Keri Phillips. 'Bye till next time.

Pan Am 103 case: A study in propaganda service

[This is part of the headline over a long article by Professor Emeritus Edward S Herman of the University of Pennsylvania that was published on the Global Research website on this date in 2007. It reads as follows:]

New York Times propaganda service has often been dramatically displayed in connection with the shooting down of civilian airliners. The editors were hysterical over the Soviet shooting down of Korean airliner 007 on August 31, 1983: 270 articles and 2,789 column inches during September 1983 alone, along with an editorial designation of the incident as “cold-blooded mass murder.” The paper took as truth the official and party line that the Soviets knew they were shooting down a civilian airliner. Several years later the editors acknowledged that their assumption had been wrong, but they blamed this on the government, not their own gullibility (ed, The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down, Jan 18, 1988). It had done no investigative work on the case in the interim, and the lie was shot down based on information developed outside the media.

In a markedly contrasting response, when Israel shot down a Libyan airliner over the Sinai desert in February 1973, although in this case there was no question but that the Israelis knew they were downing a civilian airliner, the New York Times covered the incident much less intensively and without expressing the slightest indignation, let alone using words like “cold-blooded” or “murder.”

Equally interesting, the paper recognized the political importance of their treatment of each of these events: in the Soviet case, in a year-later retrospective, Times reporter Bernard Gwertzman wrote that US officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” With the orchestrated intense and indignant coverage of this shootdown the Soviets had suffered not only harsh criticism but boycotts for its action. By contrast, Israel suffered not the slightest damage. The New York Times editorialized that “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan plane in the Sinai peninsula last week” (ed, March 1, 1973). Within a week of the shootdown, the Israeli Prime Minister was welcomed in Washington without incident or intrusive questions. In short, blame and debate is a function of utility, which is to say, political advantage. Where it helps, as in putting the Soviets in a bad light, we support assigning blame, indignation and debate; where it would injure a client, “no useful purpose” would be served by such treatment. And somehow the UN and “international community” react in ways that conform to what the US government and New York Times perceive as useful.

In the case of Pan Am 103, the political aspect of assigning blame has been clearly and, arguably, overwhelmingly important. The plane was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, with 270 plane casualties (and 11 persons killed on the ground). This followed by only five and a half months the US navy’s shooting down of Iranian airliner 655 in July 1988, killing 290, mainly Iranian pilgrims. The link between the two events was quickly seen, and the likelihood that the later event was an act of vengeance by Iran was a working hypothesis, supported further by an unproven claim of Western security forces that Iran had offered a $10 million reward for a retaliatory act. As the case developed it was soon a consensus of investigators that the Pan Am action had been the work of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) under the leadership of Ahmed Jibral, based in Syria, and responding to the Iranian offer.

But then, as relations with Saddam Hussein deteriorated in 1989 and 1990, and the United States sought better relations with Syria and Iran in the run-up to the first Persian Gulf War, Western officials became quiet on the Syria-Iran connection, followed by a fairly rapid shift from “definitive” proof of PFLP-Syrian-Iranian involvement to “definitive” proof that it was a Libyan act. As Paul Foot noted, “The evidence against the PFLP which had been so carefully put together and was so immensely impressive was quietly but firmly junked” (Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice, Private Eye, May/June 2001, p 10). Libya provided a suitable new culprit, as it was already on the U.S.-UK hit list and had been subjected to a series of efforts at “regime change,” a hostility based on its independence, support of the Palestinians and other dissident forces (including the ANC and Mandela in their resistance to the apartheid regime), as well as occasional support of anti-Western terrorists. So Libya it was.

The Libyan connection lasted in pristine condition from 1990 into 2007, during which time Libya was subjected to intensive vilification, costly sanctions imposed by the Security Council, and a highly publicized trial in Scotland that resulted in the conviction of a Libyan national for the Lockerbie murders, with further bad publicity for Libya and Kaddafi, and a payment of several billion dollars in victim compensation that Libya felt compelled to provide (although still denying any involvement in the shootdown). All this despite the fact that many experts and observers, including some victim family members, felt that the trial was a political event and a judicial farce that yielded an unwarranted and unjust conviction.

This belief in the injustice of the court decision was greatly strengthened in June 2007 when a Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission issued a decision that found the 2001 trial and decision flawed and opened the way for a fresh appeal for the convicted Libyan. If this decision is validated, the world will be left without a party responsible for the Pan Am-103 bombing, but with the strong likelihood that attention will be refocused on the PFLP and its sponsors, Syria and Iran. Is it not an amazing coincidence that this second turnaround occurs as Libya becomes more acceptable to the United States and its allies and these Western powers are now retargeting Syria and Iran?

We should note one other set of facts in this controversy that bears on the quality of “international justice.” That is, the treatment by the United States, New York Times, and international community of the shooting down of the Iranian airliner 655 by the US warship Vincennes in July 1988 and the process of bringing justice to the families of the victims of that act. It is true that this was not a planned destruction of an airliner, but it was carried out by a U.S. naval commander noted for his “Rambo” qualities and the civilian airliner destroyed was closely following its assigned air space (in contrast with 007). A point rarely mentioned in the U.S. media is that the U.S. naval vessel that shot the plane down was on a mission in aid of Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against Iran.

The Reagan administration did express “deep regret” at the incident, although blaming Iran for hostile actions that provoked the U.S. action (which were later shown to have been non-existent) and for failing to terminate its war against Iraq–and as the United States was supporting Iraq, by definition Iran was the aggressor. It also paid some $132 million as compensation, including $62 million for the families of the victims. This is, of course, substantially less than Kaddafi felt obligated to pay the victims of Pan Am 103, the ratio of payments to the respective victims being roughly 30 to 1.

The New York Times, which had had an editorial entitled “Murder” in connection with the 007 shootdown, asserted back in 1983 that “There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner,” but it predictably found one for the 655 case: “the incident must still be seen as not as a crime [let alone “murder”] but as a blunder, and a tragedy.” Neither the UN Security Council nor International Civil Aviation Organization condemned the United States for this action, although both had done so as regards the Soviet Union in the case of Korean airliner 007, and of course the Security Council would eventually take severe action against Libya in regard to Pan Am 103. There was no punishment whatsoever meted out to Rambo Captain Will Rogers, who got a “hero’s welcome” upon his return to San Diego five months after the shoot-down (Robert Reinhold, Crew of Cruiser That Downed Iranian Airliner Gets a Warm Homecoming, NYT, Oct 25, 1988), and was subsequently awarded a Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service.” The Iranians were naturally angry at this reception and treatment of the man responsible for killing 290 mainly Iranian civilians, and were possibly a bit resentful at the workings of the system of international justice as it impacted them.

Polls indicated that the warm greeting Rogers got in San Diego was not an aberration—the public was pleased with his accomplishment. This reflected the fact that media coverage of the 655 shootdown had focused on official claims about the reason for the deadly act, not the plight of the victims and the grief of their families—which was the heavy and continuing focus of attention in both the 007 and Pan Am 103 cases. The alleged suffering of Captain Rogers got more attention than that of the 290 victims and their families. We are back to the contrast between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, and the “useful purpose” of the focus of attention, as seen by the U.S. establishment and media.

One further note on international justice concerns the treatment of the US bombing of Libya on April 14, 1986. That attack followed by little more than a week the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin that was quickly blamed by the Reagan administration on Libya, though proof of this connection was never forthcoming. The US bombing attack targeted Kadaffi’s residence, and, while failing to assassinate him, killed his young daughter along with 40 or more Libyan civilians. This was an act of state terrorism and a straightforward violation of the UN Charter, but here again a US (along with supportive British and French) veto prevented any UN Security Council condemnation, let alone other action, in response to this terrorism. The UN can act only when the United States wants it to act; it can never do anything in response to US or US client state violence, no matter how egregious. And the case of Libya and Pan Am 103 affords strong evidence that when the United States wants the UN to act against a target, serious penalties and other forms of damage can be inflicted that are based on false charges and a corrupted legal process (as described below).

We may note also that the New York Times editors were delighted with the 1986 terroristic attack on Libya. Their editorial on the subject stated that “The smoke in Tripoli has barely cleared, yet on the basis of early information even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya” (ed, The Terrorist and His Sentence, April 15, 1986), The “early information” showed only that while the assassination attempt had failed scores of what the editors would call “innocent civilians” in a reverse context were killed. Thus once again the editors expose their belief that international law does not apply to the United States, and it demonstrates once again that civilians killed by the US government are “unworthy” victims whose deaths the editors can literally applaud.

As in the case of the shooting down of 007, on November 14, 1999 the New York Times had big headlines and lavished a great deal of attention and indignation on the US-British indictment of two Libyans alleged to have been the bombers of Pan Am 103, and it provided similar headlines, attention and indignation when the Scottish court found one of the two Libyans guilty on January 31, 2001. By contrast, the report that the Scottish Review Court had found the trial of the Libyans badly flawed and suggested that justice called for a new trial, was given no editorial attention and a single question-begging article (Alan Cowell, Lockerbie Ruling Raises Questions On Libyan’s Guilt, June 29, 2007).

At no time did any of the 15 Times editorials on the Pan Am 103 shootdown and Libya connection express the slightest reservation about the process or substance of the charges against the Libyans. As regards the politics of the case, with the seemingly strong case involving the PLP, Syria and Iran abandoned just when the United States was briefly cozying up to Syria and Iran, shifting to the continuing target Libya, the editors did refer to “cynics” who thought the administration “finds it convenient to downplay Syria’s dreadful record now that Damascus has joined Middle East peace negotiations” (ed, “Seeking the Truth About Libya,” March 30, 1992), but the editors refused to accept this cynical notion and, most important, it didn’t cause them to examine the evidence against Libya more closely. This was their government, Libya was a villain, and patriotism and built-in bias kept their blinders firmly in place.

As regards legal process, following the US-Scottish charges against the two Libyans, Libya immediately arrested the two suspects and started a judicial investigation, which followed precisely the requirements of the 1971 Montreal Convention dealing with acts of violence involving civil aviation. Libya promised to try the two men if evidence was supplied it, and it offered to allow observers and requested international assistance in gathering evidence. The United States and Britain rejected this on the ground that Libya would never convict its own, although if the trial was flawed they could have demanded action from the World Court. An exceptional Times op-ed column by Marc Weller argued that what Libya did was in accord with international law and that the US-UK action was not only illegal but also abused and politicized the Security Council (“Libyan Terrorism, American Vigilantism” Feb 15, 1992).

The Times’ editors ignored the Weller argument: as always, for the editors international law doesn’t apply to the United States. Also, it was clear to them that Libya could not be trusted to try its own—just as it never occurred to them that a trial of Libyans in the West could be anything but justice in action, even though the advance publicity by Western officials, once again demonizing the alleged villains and alleging “irrefutable evidence,” put great pressure on judges and juries and made a fair trial problematic.

A standard form of propagandistic journalism is to provide “balance” by citing on the “other side” the villains and their sponsors rather than independent critics. In past years the New York Times regularly cited Soviet officials for balance, rather than dissident US citizens who would have had more credibility with US audiences. In the Libya-Pan Am 103 case, the Times regularly cited Kaddaffi (“ranting”) and other Libyans as charging political bias in the proceedings, while neglecting Westerners with more authority. Most notorious, the Times has yet to cite Dr. Hans Köchler, [an Austrian] legal scholar who was Kofi Annan’s appointed observer at the trial of the two Libyans in the Netherlands (Camp Zeist) under Scottish law. Köchler produced a powerful Report and Evaluation of the Lockerbie Trial in February 2001 that was widely reported and featured in the Scottish and other European media, but was never once mentioned by the Times in its news or editorials. The other expert almost entirely ignored by the Times was Professor Robert Black, a Scottish legal authority who was an important contributor to the arrangements for the trial at Zeist, who followed it closely, and was immensely knowledgeable on both the trial and Scottish law. Black was mentioned briefly twice in Times news articles, but never in an editorial. It can hardly be a coincidence that the ignoring of Köchler and marginalizing of Black paralleled their finding the trial a travesty, badly politicized (Kochler) and with a judicial decision unsupported by credible evidence (Black [“a fraud”] and Kochler).

The Times has repeatedly claimed that the case against the Libyans resulted from a model police effort—they used the phrase “meticulous British and American police work” more than once—and it was allegedly supported by “hundreds of witnesses” and “thousands of bits of evidence.” Thus, while the trial never yielded a smoking gun, it provided compelling “circumstantial evidence.” At no point does the paper acknowledge any possible mismanagement or corruption in the collection and processing of evidence. Among the points never mentioned are that:

Not only “police” but the US CIA and other personnel were on the crash scene on December 21, 1988 within two hours of the disaster, moving about freely, removing and possibly altering evidence in violation of the rules of dealing with crash-scene evidence, and over-riding the supposed authority of the Scottish police (for details, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience, chapter 12, “’An Old-Fashioned Police Investigation’”). Presumably, for the Times, just as international law doesn’t apply to the United States, neither do the rules of proper assembling of evidence.

The key piece of evidence, a fragment from a timer, was first marked “cloth, charred,” but was later overwritten with the word “debris,” a change never adequately explained. Some months later, upon examination by UK forensic expert Thomas Hayes, a note about this fragment was written by him, but the page numbers were subsequently overwritten and renumbered, again without explanation. Months later, marks on the timer were allegedly identified with MEBO, a Swiss firm that manufactured timers, and one that did business with Libya. This was “conclusive evidence,” although MEBO also sold the timers to East Germany, Libya might have provided the timer to others, MEBO had reported several break-ins at its factory to the Swiss police between October 1988 and February 1989. Furthermore, when finally shown the fragment MEBO’s owner said it was a different color from his own, and it turned out that the CIA had this very timer in its possession.

All three forensic scientists who worked intensively on this case, one for the FBI (Tom Thurman) and two for a branch of the UK ministry of defense (Allen Feraday and Thomas Hayes) had run into trouble in the past for concealment of evidence (Hayes), wrong conclusions (in one case, false testimony on a explosive timer—Feraday), and fabrication of evidence (Tom Thurman). (See Foot, op cit, App 2, “The Three Forensic Geniuses.”)

The CIA had a major role in creating the case, their primary witness being the Libyan defector Majid Giaka. The CIA offered him to the prosecution even though years ago they had decided that he was a liar and con man. Giaka had said nothing about any Libyan connection to the Pan Am bombing for months after it took place, and he came through only when threatened with a funds cutoff. Paul Foot asks ” Why was such an obviously corrupt and desperate liar produced by the prosecution at all?” It is also testimony to the quality of the legal process that for a while the CIA refused to produce cables and e-mail messages regarding Giaka, arguing that they were irrelevant. When finally reluctantly produced they were not irrelevant, but showed the CIA’s own low opinion of Giaka. The Times did have a news article or two that described Giaka’s poor record and malperformance on the stand, but none of the 15 editorials mentioned him or allowed this phase of the proceeding to limit their admiration for police and prosecution.

Neither the US nor UK governments nor the Zeist court was willing to explore alternative models, several of which were more plausible than the one involving Libya. The one already mentioned, featuring the PFLP-Syria-Iran connection, was compelling: PFLP’s German members were found in possession of radio cassettes and workable timers; they had already used these in bombing attacks; they were known to have cased the Frankfurt airport just before the day of the bombing; one of their operatives had visited Malta and the shopkeeper who sold the clothes found in the Pan Am-103 debris first identified this individual (Abu Talb) as the purchaser; and there was evidence of this group’s link to Iran and claims of a paid contract, among other points.

In a related scenario, the bomb was introduced by the PFLP into the suitcase of Khalid Jaafar, an agent in a drug-running operation, protected by the CIA as part of its hostage-release program. The CIA involvement in this drug-running operation may have been one reason for the hasty and aggressive CIA takeover of the search at the crash site; and it, and the closely related desire to avoid disturbing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian terrorists holding Western hostages, may also help explain why President Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher apparently agreed in March 1989 to prevent any uncontrolled investigation of the bombing.

Not only were these governments unwilling to look at alternatives, they actually blocked other inquiries and pursued and tried to damage individuals who did so (see Ashton and Ferguson, Cover-Up, chap 8, “The Knives Come Out”). The Zeist court conformed to this program, with the result that actors for whom the “circumstantial evidence” was far more compelling than in the case of the Libyans were excluded from consideration.

The Times found the original US-British charges and the Scottish court’s decision satisfying, although based only on “circumstantial evidence.” They provided no serious analysis of this evidence, and both Robert Black and Hans Köchler, among many others, found the evidence completely inadequate to sustain a conviction except in a court where a conviction was a political necessity. Consider the following:

Although the case was built on the argument that the two Libyans carried out the operation together as a team, only one was convicted. As Köchler said: “This is totally incomprehensible for any rational observer when one considers that the indictment in its very essence was based on the joint action of the two accused in Malta.” This result can best be explained by the need to have somebody found guilty.

There is no evidence that the convicted Libyan, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, put a suitcase on the connecting flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was supposedly transferred to Pan Am 103. Air Malta is notable for its close checking of baggage, and when UK’s Granada Television claimed that the death bag had gone through it to Pan Am 103, Air Malta sued. Its evidence that only 55 bags with ascribed passengers—none of whom went on to London–were on that flight was so compelling that Granada settled out-of-court, paying damages and costs. This of course never made it into the New York Times, and had little effect on the Zeist court, which eventually said that how the unaccompanied bag was put on the plane “is a major difficulty for the Crown case,” but it didn’t interfere with the finding of guilt.

The identification of al-Megrahi as the Malta purchaser of the clothing whose remnants were found in the wreckage was a travesty of judicial procedure. The selling storekeeper, Tony Gauci, originally said the buyer was six feet tall and 50 or more years old—al-Megrahi is 5-8 and was 37 years old in 1988. Gauci then identified Talb as the man, but eventually latched on to al-Megrahi after having seen his picture in the paper. There were many other weaknesses in this identification, including the timing of the purchase, so that like the disposition of the suitcase this also was another beyond-tenuous “circumstantial.”

The logic of the official scenario also suffers from the fact that putting a bomb-laden bag through from Malta that had to go through a second inspection and two stopovers in the delay-frequent Christmas season, would be poor planning as it risked either apprehension or a badly timed explosion; and including clothing that could be traced to Malta and with the alleged bomber (al-Megrahi) making his purchase openly would be extremely unprofessional. On the other hand, a timer frequently used by the PFLP was estimated by a German expert to explode 38 minutes after takeoff, and Pan Am 103 exploded 38 minutes after takeoff.

As noted earlier, the timer with the MEBO insignia came forth belatedly. It was gathered in a crash scene effort that violated all the rules and was then worked over in questionable circumstances by people who had an established record of creating and massaging evidence. These lags and problematics should have ruled out the acceptance of this evidence in a criminal trial by a non-political court. But even taking it at face value it fails to prove Libyan involvement in the bombing attack as this timer was available to others, and may have been stolen from the MEBO factory in the 1988-1989 break-ins.

The Times notes that “prosecutors credibly linked him [al-Megrahi] to bomb-making materials and presented persuasive testimony that he worked for Libya’s intelligence services.” Yes, this goes beyond his Libyan.citizenship, and the man was also sometimes in Malta! Imagine how the Times would treat an accusation against a CIA agent based on the fact that the accused had “access to weapons” and was in fact a member of the CIA! The Times doesn’t ask for much in the way of “evidence” when in the patriotic mode.

In its low-keyed news article on the Scottish Review Commission’s repudiation of the Zeist court’s decision ( “Lockerbie Ruling Raises Questions on Libyan’s Guilt,” June 29, 2007), Times reporter Alan Cowell does a creditable job of protecting his paper for failing to question another “lie that wasn’t shot down.” The Review Commission apparently leaned over backwards to avoid charging the Zeist court with judicial malpractice, so Cowell latches on to the fact that the Review stresses “new evidence that we have found and new evidence that was not before the trial court,” as well as their denial that there was proof of fabricated evidence. But much of that new evidence was deliberately excluded by the trial court, and some of it was hidden by the prosecution and its US and UK political and intelligence sponsors. And while there is perhaps no hard proof of fabricated evidence, there is solid documentation of its questionable handling and possible fabrication, which should have precluded its acceptance by the trial court.

Instead of citing Hans Kochler or Robert Black, Cowell quotes Dan Cohen, whose daughter went down with Pan Am 103, who expresses regret that al-Megrahi might go home a hero. Possibly more honorable would have been a Times apology and expression of sympathy for the Libyan victim, who will have spent 6 or 7 years in prison on the basis of manipulated and laughable evidence in another show trial, but which the Times repeatedly claimed was justice in action.

In her 1993 memoir The Downing Street Years, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote that after the 1986 US bombing of Libya, which used British airbases and in which Kaddaffi’s two-year old daughter was killed, “There were revenge killings of British hostages organized by Libya, which I deeply regretted. But the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place.” Ms Thatcher seems to have forgotten Pan Am 103, or could she have momentarily forgotten that Libya was supposed to have been guilty of this act, and, writing honestly but carelessly for the historical record implicitly acknowledged here that this was a fraud that she had helped perpetrate. This nugget was reported in South Korea’s OhMyNews, but was somehow overlooked by the paper of record.