Lockerbie has "disappeared from the radar screen" in US

[What follows is taken from a report published yesterday evening on the website of the Rochester, New York, newspaper the Democrat & Chronicle:]

Before 9/11, there was Pan Am Flight 103.

The bombing of the flight, which crashed in Scotland in December 1988 while en route to New York, was to that point the deadliest act of terror against the United States in the country’s history. Of the 270 people killed in the attack, 189 were Americans. And two of them were students enrolled at the University of Rochester, who were returning home from a study abroad program.

“It had a particular impact on those of us who had come back the semester before,” said Mark Zaid, who was a student at UR at the time of the crash and had spent the previous semester overseas. “We looked at it like: We left and we came back. But they left and they didn’t come back. And how arbitrary that could have been.”

For Zaid, the deaths of Eric Coker and Katharine Hollister — both of whom were in the UR class of 1990 — were a launching point to what would become more than two decades of work.

Upon graduating law school, Zaid began pushing for legislation that would allow for a civil lawsuit against any countries that promoted state-sponsored terrorism. The legislation was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996, and Zaid went on to represent about 30 of the Flight 103 families in a lawsuit against Libya, the home country of the national who was eventually convicted of the bombings.

Eventually, Muammar Gaddafi eventually accepted responsibility for the attack — though he claimed he did not order it — and settled with the affected families for $2.7 billion, or $10 million per family. [RB: Gaddafi and Libya did not accept responsibility for the attack. Libya accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials. The full text of the relevant document can be read here.] 

On Monday, Zaid will speak about his experiences in the Hawkins-Carlson Reading Room in UR’s Rush Rhees Library.

“The $2.7 billion settlement was largest state settlement for terrorism ever. I thought it should have been more, but it was not insignificant,” said Zaid. “But coupled with that was your usual civil settlement, meaning no admission of (guilt).”

So in recent years, Zaid has been working to get the government to pursue more information about the attacks. After Gaddafi’s reign came to a violent end in Libya in August 2011, many of his senior leadership began fleeing the country, said Zaid. Those intelligence chiefs would know more about who was may truly have been behind the attack; many think the man who was convicted of the attacks, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was taking orders from higher up.

“We have an open criminal case still, here in the United States, so what’s being done?” he said. “Maybe something’s being done — I don’t know — but publicly, we don’t know anything.” (...)

Matthew Lenoe, chair of the UR history department, said that his department was hosting the lecture in part because of the local connections, but also because the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 is clearly still relevant.

However, since it happened 13 years before 9/11, it isn’t viewed in quite the same way. “It’s clearly part of a history that’s still topical,” said Lenoe. “But there have been so many other terrorist attacks since then that it has sort of disappeared from the radar screen.” [RB: If it has disappeared from the radar screen in the United States, this is because American media have resolutely and perversely ignored the devastating challenges to the officially-sanctified version of events provided by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, John Ashton, Morag Kerr, James Robertson and others.]

Libya agrees Lockerbie deal

[This is the headline over a report carried on the BBC News website on this date in 2003. It reads in part:]

Lawyers acting for families of the Lockerbie bombing victims say they have reached agreement with Libya on the payment of compensation.

The deal to set up a $2.7bn (£1.7bn) fund was struck with Libyan officials after negotiations in London.

Once the money is in place, Libya is expected to write to the United Nations saying it takes responsibility for the attack on Pan Am flight 103. (...)

Under the deal Libya was expected to start transferring the compensation money - up to $10m for every victim - into a Swiss bank account immediately.

The US is then expected to write to the UN Security Council to say it believes Libya has met the conditions for lifting of sanctions, which were suspended in 1999.

Britain would circulate a draft resolution calling for that step to be taken.

Lawyer Mark Zaid, who represents about 50 of the Lockerbie families, has been involved in the negotiations with the Libyan government.

He told BBC Scotland that the potential $10m pay-out was conditional on three events.

"The lifting of UN sanctions will result in a $4m pay-out," he explained.

"The lifting of US sanctions will result in a $4m pay-out and then if Libya is removed from the US State Department's state sponsored list of terrorists $2m will be paid."

David Ben-Aryeah, a spokesman for UK relatives, said there were "serious misgivings" about whether the two later instalments would ever be paid.

"The UK relatives, who have honoured me with their trust and friendship, have had two basic demands from the very first days - truth and justice," he said.

"We have had a form of justice but we have not had anything approaching the truth.

"They asked the foreign secretary for a full and independent inquiry. He rejected that request."

Mr Zaid said he hoped that the families would be told some of the language being used by Libya in its proposed acceptance of responsibility at [a] briefing on Friday.

"It would not surprise me if there are families who are not satisfied with the language," he said.

"The fact of the matter is that this is a financial deal for Libya. All Libya cares about is to extricate itself from these sanctions and re-enter the international and particularly the US market.

"The statement of responsibility will be diplomatic legalese. That's the way the process works.

"It will be a statement, most likely, that can be interpreted one way or the other depending on who the reader is."

He predicted that it would not go far enough for some families, who may decide to go forward with civil litigation.

George Williams, one of the leaders of the group representing the American families, said the language contained in the letter to the UN would be crucial.

"If he is just going to blame it on an individual citizen of Libya and say that the government has nothing to do with it then that is not acceptable at all," he said.

"I would just as soon have the UN sanctions re-imposed and continue until Colonel Gaddafi curls up in a corner and dies."

However, he said the compensation deal was "pretty much done".

"The only thing that would satisfy us more would be to have Gaddafi's head delivered on a platter over to the US and let us all walk by it and spit on it," he said.

[RB: Further details are to be found in Q&A: The Lockerbie compensation deal published by BBC News on the same day.]

"Unfortunately, all I’ve seen is that the wheels of justice grind infinitely slow"

[What follows is excerpted from an obituary of Allan Gerson, published today on the website of The Washington Post:]

Allan Gerson, a Washington lawyer and legal scholar who helped pioneer the practice of suing foreign governments in US courts for complicity in terrorism, representing victims’ families in the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, died Dec 1 at his home in the District [of Columbia]. He was 74. (...)

As a young Justice Department trial lawyer, he pursued Nazi war criminals who had immigrated to the United States, later rising to become senior counsel to two US ambassadors to the United Nations, Jeane J Kirkpatrick and Gen Vernon A Walters.

Throughout, he maintained that the law had a decisive role in public policy and international affairs — a belief that drove his decade-long fight for justice for the victims of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988, en route to New York from London.

The bombing killed all 259 passengers and crew — along with 11 people on the ground — and remains the deadliest terrorist attack in British history. Among the victims were 189 Americans, including many study-abroad students from Syracuse University.

Mr Gerson launched what began as a seemingly quixotic legal effort, seeking to obtain compensation for victims’ families from the government of Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi, which was accused of carrying out the bombing. His work spurred new legislation that paved the way for lawsuits against countries including Syria, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Libya, where a legal team negotiated a $2.7 billion settlement in 2003 for the Lockerbie bombing.

“It took a lot of creative lawyering to come up with a system that would enable those victims to recover,” said Beth Van Schaack, an international criminal lawyer who teaches human rights at Stanford Law School. “There was no long history of precedents to draw on,” she added. “They were making stuff up as they went along . . . and now it’s become a standard practice. If a terrorist attack happens, there are lawyers who specialize in this area.”

Mr. Gerson’s work on the case emerged out of a 1992 op-ed he wrote in The New York Times, calling for the United Nations to create a claims commission to compensate survivors’ families using Libyan assets. His article caught the attention of Bruce M Smith, a former Pan Am pilot whose wife was killed in Lockerbie and who retained Mr Gerson in an effort to bring the UN proposal to fruition.

That idea never took off, leading Mr Gerson to launch his campaign to sue Libya for damages — a gambit that tested the centuries-old doctrine of sovereign immunity, in which governments are effectively considered above the law, not subject to civil suits or criminal prosecution without their consent. It was also unusual in that Mr Gerson was representing just one of the victims’ relatives, Smith, with other families taking part in a suit charging Pan Am with negligence for failing to detect the bomb.

“If we’d known all the difficulties at the outset,” he later told Washington City Paper, “we probably never would have proceeded.”

Mr. Gerson partnered with a recent law school graduate, Mark S Zaid, and filed suit in a federal court in New York in 1993. By then, he had been forced out of the Washington office of Hughes Hubbard & Reed, where a colleague was hired to take on Gaddafi as a client, resulting in a conflict of interest.

Their case proved unsuccessful amid sovereign immunity concerns. But as it proceeded, Mr Gerson and Zaid embarked on a new tack, drafting and championing what became the 1996 Anti­terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which enabled lawsuits against countries designated by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism.

In a phone interview, Zaid said he took the lead on drafting the legislation but credited Mr Gerson with overseeing the broader strategy, and with helping to forge political connections that smoothed its passage in Congress.

“He was very much a visionary, trying to come up with innovative legal theories to pursue claims that other people would have written off without any second thought,” he said. “He saw in his mind a path forward to accomplish justice, especially for these victims of terrorism that no one else was thinking of at the time.”

The legislation was signed into law following another terrorist attack, the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. After Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in 2001, a civil suit against Libya moved ahead, resulting in $10 million compensation for each victim, paid out over several years from an escrow account in a Swiss bank.

In 2016, Congress overrode President Barack Obama’s veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which carved out further exemptions to sovereign immunity and enabled 9/11 victims’ families to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged support for the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Mr Gerson was part of a team representing many of the families, and the case was still working its way through the courts when he died.

“There is a famous quote, that the wheels of justice grind infinitely slow but infinitely fine,” he told City Paper in 2002, while still awaiting resolution on Lockerbie. “Unfortunately, all I’ve seen is that the wheels of justice grind infinitely slow.” (...)

Mr Gerson developed close relationships with some of the families of the Lockerbie bombing victims and discussed their plight in The Price of Terror (2001), written with journalist Jerry Adler. The book also covered the legal drama surrounding the terrorist attack, looking somewhat optimistically toward the future.

“Terrorists who might be undeterred by the threat of American military force,” the authors wrote, “must now weigh the possibility of retaliation by the world’s largest contingent of lawyers.”

$2.7 billion Lockerbie settlement reached

[This is the headline over a report published on Aljazeera’s English language website on this date in 2003. It reads as follows:]

Libya has signed a deal with the families of victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in which Tripoli will shell out $2.7 billion in compensation.

Under the accord, Tripoli will pay each of the families $10 million in instalments, based on the lifting of United Nations and United States sanctions, said lawyers on Thursday.

Libya will also be removed from Washington’s list of nations which allegedly support “terrorism”.

Representatives of British families whose relatives were killed in the Pan Am flight 103 disaster over the Scottish town of Lockerbie that left 270 people dead, said the deal was “purely financial” and doubted the money would be paid.

“This is a financial deal for Libya. This is all Libya cares about, to extricate itself from the sanctions and re-enter the international, in particular US, market,” claimed Mark Zaid, a US lawyer for 50 of the families.

In 2001, Scottish court Camp Zeist, set up in the Netherlands, convicted Abd al-Basset Ali al-Megrahi, one of two Libyan agents charged with the bombing, and sentenced him to life in prison.

After signing the accord on Wednesday, family lawyers said they expected the compensation to be deposited with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) soon, and that Libya would be sending its letter accepting responsibility to the UN Security Council.

Diplomatic sources said on Tuesday that Libya had agreed to send a letter to the Security Council, either by Thursday or Friday, admitting it was behind the attack. [RB: Libya, of course, never did admit it was behind the attack: it accepted "responsibility for the acts of its citizens".]

The first $4 millions are expected to be paid to the victims’ families when world body sanctions against Tripoli are lifted, following its acceptance of responsibility.

The embargo was suspended but not llifted after Libya handed over the two former Libyan intelligence agents in the case.

Lifting UN sanctions will pave the way for talks between Washington and Tripoli about the lifting of separate US sanctions.

A further $4 million would be delivered to each family once US sanctions are lifted and the final $2 million would be handed over if Libya is removed from the US list of states allegedly supporting “terrorism”.