Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 2568 Location: One breath from Glory
Posted: Sat Dec 21, 2013 1:22 pm Post subject: 25th Anniversary-Any nearer the truth?
Dr David Swire whose daughter was murdered gives an eloquent and poignant interview. He tells of the discrete information whispered to one of the other bereaved relatives during their visit to the US Embassy that both US and UK governments know exactly what happened but will never tell.
"My brother Abdelbaset could not have committed this heinous crime. He could never hurt any single person, let alone 271 innocent victims".
Abdel-Hakim Al-Megrahi insisted his brother had not been a Libyan intelligence officer, and claimed he had instead been a graduate in aviation engineering who had been employed by Libyan Airlines.
'Like slaves'
He added: "However, if he was used [as a scapegoat] for this problem [Lockerbie] - it's possible that he was used because the Gaddafi regime used to use any Libyan. In truth Libya was like a farm for Gaddafi and his sons and as Libyan nationals, we were like slaves - we couldn't say "no". We couldn't, this is the truth.
"But I assure you, and with reference to all the universities my brother studied in, be it in the US, Britain and Pakistan - he is a graduate of aviation engineering."
...
Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died when the Pan-Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988, said earlier this week that some families of those who died may seek a fresh appeal against Megrahi's conviction.
Mr Swire believes that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted of the atrocity.
But Scottish and US investigators stand by the evidence presented at his trial and are pursuing other potential suspects.
In a BBC interview on Monday, the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland said "the conviction stands".
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-25465662 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Mystery continues to surround the 1988 downing of Panam Flight 103 at Lockerbie - who did it, how, and why? After 25 years study of the topic Patrick Haseldine reveals the shocking truth.
Following Bernt Carlsson's untimely death in the Lockerbie bombing, the case against URENCO was inexplicably dropped and no further prosecutions took place.
A little over two weeks ago, my wife and I were seated beside the flower bedecked pulpit in a packed Westminster Abbey.
There was an eerie hush as Big Ben's muffled chimes tolled 7:00 pm - the exact moment 25 years earlier when Pan Am Flight 103 was sabotaged over Lockerbie in Scotland on 21st December 1988.
All 259 passengers and crew were killed, as were 11 people in the town. The names of the 270 Lockerbie bombing victims were listed alphabetically in the Order of Service, and five relatives took it in turns to read them out.
Thus it was Jane Swire, mother of victim Flora and wife of Dr Jim Swire, who read the name of the 43rd victim on the list: Bernt Wilmar Carlsson.
United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, was Lockerbie's highest profile victim, yet the authorities and the media never mention him. Why?
As comedian Kenneth Williams used to say: "I think the answer lies in the soil."
More specifically, I believe the answer lies in the processed uranium ore (Yellowcake) that was illegally extracted from Namibia in the period 1976 to 1989. A TV documentary film in March 1980 described succinctly what was going on:
"World In Action investigates the secret contract and operations arranged by British-based Rio Tinto Zinc Corp to import into Britain uranium (Yellowcake) from the Rössing Uranium Mine in Namibia, whose major shareholders are the governments of Iran and South Africa.
"This contract having received the blessing of the British government is now compromising the UK's position in the United Nations negotiations to remove apartheid South Africa from Namibia, which it is illegally occupying."
Thatcher "proud to be British"
Within four months of the Lockerbie disaster, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided to make a whistle-stop tour of southern Africa, and found time to visit Namibia's Rössing Uranium Mine where she was accompanied by David Cameron, then a youthful Conservative Central Office researcher.
Mrs Thatcher was so impressed by the Rössing Uranium Mine that she declared it made her "proud to be British".
While Mrs Thatcher was in Namibia, she put improper pressure on the UN's man, Martti Ahtisaari, head of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group, to permit the South African Defence Force (SADF) to take action against SWAPO soldiers who were peacefully returning to Namibia to vote in the November 1989 independence elections.
As a result, as many as 308 SWAPO soldiers were killed - "shot in the back" according to former SADF major Nico Basson.
Whether Mrs Thatcher could have persuaded UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, to agree to such treachery we shall never know since Mr Carlsson was assassinated fifteen weeks earlier, on 21st December 1988.
Illegal mining
In 1974, the UN Council for Namibia issued Decree No. 1 prohibited the extraction and distribution of any natural resource from Namibian territory without the explicit permission of the UNCN (United Nations Council for Namibia).
It also provided for the seizure of any illegally exported material, and warned that violators could be held liable for damages. Projected to be Namibia's largest mining operation, Rössing became the primary target of Decree No. 1.
However, many Western governments (including the US and Britain) refused to accept Decree No. 1 as binding, with lawyers and government officials disputing whether the decree was juridically sound, whether and how it might apply, and which courts might enforce its application.
But the bottom line was that Rössing aimed to supply at least 10 percent of the global uranium market which translated into one-third of Britain's needs, and probably more for Japan.
Decree No. 1 therefore sparked a lengthy international struggle over the legitimacy of Rössing uranium. The UNCN sent out numerous delegations to convince governments to suspend their dealings with Namibia.
Only one country pledged to respect Decree No. 1
They heard many expressions of support for the independence process, but prior to the mid-1980s only Sweden (among the large Western uranium consumers) pledged to boycott Rössing's product.
Activists stepped up the pressure in a wide variety of forums. In the UK and the Netherlands, they joined forces with the anti-nuclear movement, resulting in organisations like the British CANUC (Campaign Against the Namibian Uranium Contract).
The UNCN held a week-long hearing in July 1980, during which experts and activists from Europe, Japan, and the United States gave presentations on Rössing's operations and contracts, and the TV documentary Follow the Yellowcake Road was screened.
Testimony focused on the relationship between southern Africa and the Western nuclear industry, arguing that all purchases of Namibian uranium effectively supported the colonial occupation via the taxes paid by the Rössing mine.
In 1981, Namibia's government-in-waiting (SWAPO) helped organise a seminar for West European trade unions as well as presentations on living and working conditions at Rössing and on the mine's paramilitary security forces, which appealed to the loyalties of the International Socialist movement, where Bernt Carlsson was Secretary-General.
The seminar detailed the secret movements of Rössing uranium through European planes, ships, docks, and roads, noting that European transport workers had unknowingly handled barrels of radioactive substances.
A 1982 seminar organised by the American Committee on Africa on the role of transnational corporations in Namibia focused heavily on uranium, reprising many of the arguments mounted by European activists.
UNCN legal action
In May 1985, the United Nations Council for Namibia (UNCN) began legal action against URENCO - the joint Dutch/British/West German uranium enrichment company, with plants in Capenhurst (Cheshire, England), Almelo (Netherlands) and Gronau (West Germany).
Since URENCO had been importing uranium ore from the Rössing Uranium Mine in Namibia, the company was charged with breaching UNCN Decree No. 1.
The case was expected to be ready by the end of 1985 but was delayed because URENCO argued that - despite having enriched uranium of Namibian origin since 1980 - it was impossible to tell where specific consignments came from.
When the case finally reached court in July 1986, the Dutch government took URENCO's line, claiming not to have known where the uranium had been mined.
Upon the adjournment of the URENCO proceedings, SWAPO's UN representative, Helmut Angula, insisted that other companies, such as Shell, De Beers (Consolidated Diamond Mines), Newmont, and Rio Tinto were also likely to face prosecution for breaching the UNCN Decree.
Bernt Carlsson lays down the law
The man responsible for Namibia under international law, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, spoke about these prosecutions in a World In Action TV documentary "The Case of the Disappearing Diamonds" which was broadcast by Thames Television in September 1987:
"The United Nations this year in July started legal action against one such company - the Dutch company URENCO which imports uranium."
When asked if he would be taking action against other companies such as De Beers, the diamond mining conglomerate, Bernt Carlsson replied:
"All the companies which are carrying out activities in Namibia which have not been authorised by the United Nations are being studied at present.
"As far as De Beers is concerned, the corporation has been trying to skim the cream which means they have gone for the large diamonds at the expense of the steady pace. In this way they have really shortened the lifespan of the mines.
"One would expect from a worldwide corporation like De Beers and Anglo-American that they would behave with an element of social and political responsibility. But their behaviour in the specific case of Namibia has been one of profit maximation regardless of its social, economic, political and even legal responsibility."
Delay in closing the UF6 loophole
In 1988, US Congressional Democrats began working to close the UF6 loophole. The State Department's Office of Non-proliferation and Export Policy did as well, declaring:
"It is not possible to avoid the provisions of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by swapping flags or obligations on natural uranium physically of South African origin before it enters the USA."
Nevertheless, Rössing managed to delay the implementation of restrictions which could have put it out of business. And - in the end - that delay sufficed: apartheid South Africa and other negotiating parties signed an independence accord on 22nd December 1988.
It was on his way to the signing of the agreement at UN headquarters in New York, that UN Commissioner for Namibia Bernt Carlsson became the highest profile victim of the Pan Am Flight 103 crash at Lockerbie on 21st December 1988.
URENCO case dropped
Following Bernt Carlsson's untimely death in the Lockerbie bombing, the case against URENCO was inexplicably dropped and no further prosecutions took place of the companies and countries that were in breach of the United Nations Council for Namibia Decree No. 1.
Despite this fairly obvious evidence that Bernt Carlsson was the prime target on Pan Am Flight 103, there has never been a murder investigation conducted by the CIA, FBI, Scottish Police or indeed by the United Nations.
Instead, fabricated evidence has been used to frame and wrongfully convict the Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the crime of Lockerbie.
URENCO privatisation
On 22 April 2013, David Cameron's coalition government announced plans to sell its share in URENCO - the uranium enrichment company owned by Britain, Germany and the Netherlands - unleashing a new wave of privatisations in an attempt to cut the public debt.
The UK government's one-third share in URENCO could fetch up to £3bn, making it one of the biggest privatisations in the UK in years.
Headquartered in the semi-rural Buckinghamshire village of Stoke Poges - where, appropriately enough given its atomic plot the James Bond film "Goldfinger" was partly shot - URENCO has a 31% share of the world's uranium enrichment market.
This provides the fuel for nuclear power utilities and URENCO has enrichment plants in the US and the three investor countries, including one in Capenhurst, Cheshire.
"It's a ridiculous idea", says the GMB union's national secretary for energy Gary Smith, who earlier this week complained to The Independent of the prospect of the Chinese investing in the nuclear new-build programme. "We're flogging off precious nuclear assets instead of developing a strategy around nuclear. It's absolute madness."
But there is a logic to the move: by privatising URENCO, the British government hopes to bring closure to the Lockerbie affair, and put a distance between itself and the Thatcher administration's criminal behaviour in processing Namibian Yellowcake contrary to United Nations Council for Namibia Decree No. 1.
United Nations Inquiry
In November 2013, I created this e-petition calling upon HM Government (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) to:
"Support a United Nations Inquiry into the deaths of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and UN Assistant Secretary-General Bernt Carlsson"
Dag Hammarskjöld was Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961. On the night of 17-18 September 1961, in the course of a UN mission to try to bring peace to the former Belgian Congo, Hammarskjöld's Swedish-owned and crewed plane crashed near Ndola airport in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All the passengers and crew died.
It now appears that his plane was shot down in order to protect western mining interests in Belgian Congo's mineral rich Katanga province, to this day a major source of cobalt, copper, tin and diamonds - not to mention radium and uranium.
On 9 September 2013, the London-based Hammarskjöld Commission reported that there was "significant new evidence" about the plane crash that killed United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and recommended that the adjourned 1962 UN Inquiry should now be reopened.
UN Assistant Secretary-General Bernt Carlsson was the highest profile victim on Pan Am Flight 103 which was sabotaged over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.
Since Bernt Carlsson's death has never been investigated, the British Government should propose extending the remit of the new UN Inquiry to cover the deaths of both senior diplomats: Dag Hammarskjöld and Bernt Carlsson.
Patrick Haseldine is a former British diplomat who was dismissed by the then foreign secretary, John Major, in August 1989. He is often referred to as the "Emeritus Professor of Lockerbie Studies".
A commentary on the case of Abdelbaset al-
Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people
in the Pan Am 103 disaster.
The Lockerbie Case
lockerbiecase.blogspot.nl/2014/10/incomprehensible-verdict-that-could- be.html
Saturday, 25 October 2014
Robert Black at 08:25
Incomprehensible verdict that
could be reached only through
deliberate malpractice
Around this time in October 2009 the Crown Office announced that there would be a review of the evidence in the Lockerbie case with a view to ascertainining whether persons in addition to Abdelbaset Megrahi should stand trial. On 25 October 2009 the following item was published on this blog:
Dr Swire doubts sincerity of Crown Office announcement [In an article written for Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm , Dr Jim Swire casts doubt on the sincerity of the Crown Office's announcement of a review of the evidence in the Lockerbie case. He writes:] Naturally the UK Lockerbie relatives would love to see a fully enabled objective criminal investigation re-examining all the currently available Lockerbie evidence. But how can an objective criminal investigation not impinge on the verdict against Megrahi? The Crown Office's case against Megrahi depended on the evidence of identification by Gauci. Yet we now know that when the clothing was in fact bought from Gauci's shop, Megrahi was not even on the island of Malta, but Abu Talb was. We also now know that Harry Bell of the investigating Scots police recorded that the Americans wanted to give Gauci $10,000 'up front' with $2,000,000 to follow if conviction was successful. Clearly they must have thought the identification evidence critical. It was in Talb's flat in Sweden that the Swedish police found further items of clothing from Gauci's shop. The Crown currently has no known explanation for this. Yet if Talb, not Megrahi, bought the clothing, the verdict against Megrahi would have to be quashed. Are those currently and previously forming the Crown Office, as well as Colin Boyd, (the most implicated Lord Advocate), prepared to see their 'new investigative directions' lead to such an outcome? There is of course no evidence that any of them offered any inducements to Gauci or anyone else, but surely their careers and reputations depend on their past conduct of this case? So would the new criminal investigation be objective, I ask myself? I cannot free my mind of the words of Prof Hans Koechler, the UN's appointed special International Observer at the court: he thought the verdict so incomprehensible that it could only have been reached through (his words) 'deliberate malpractice’ by Scotland's Crown Office. So what to do? Observers should remember that under current Human Rights legislation and the Inquiries Act 2005, we the relatives have a right to a full and objective enquiry. Meanwhile those who swear by the Megrahi verdict might like to visit the London Review of Books website and search for 'Megrahi' they will find a devastating analysis as to the conduct of the trial written by Gareth Peirce, one of England's most noted miscarriage of justice and human rights lawyers. Further, if the Crown Office are really to refer matters as alleged (for I personally have no communication from them) to 'forensic experts' it is to be hoped that they will never again try to use the thoroughly discredited Hayes and Feraday. [In another article in the magazine, headed 'Cynicism and doubt over latest Crown Office “spoiler”', the following paragraph appears: "Dr Jim Swire told the Firm that - contrary to their usual practice - the Crown Office have not even contacted him to advise that any new investigation was planned. He said the coincidental timing of the Crown’s announcement had unavoidably distracted attention from the same day announcement by UK Families [Flight] 103 that they had delivered a letter to the Prime Minister asking him to instigate a full independent inquiry into the Lockerbie event under the Inquiries Act 2005. He described the Crown’s act as a “spoiler,” pointing out that any investigation would be useless as long as the Crown refused to quash the outstanding guilty verdict against Megrahi."] Share 0 Add comment Create a Link 2 comments: pete 25 October, 2014 Abu Talb is as poor a fit as Megrahi to Tony Gauci's description of the clothes purchaser. However, even if Talb's stash of Maltese clothing is unconnected to Lockerbie, it has some significance. A while back it was claimed it was inherently unlikely that a terrorist based in northern Europe would travel as far as Malta to obtain clothes to pack around the bomb, and that this made it unlikely that the bomb was introduced in London. Talb provides a counterexample to this hypothesis.
Reply
baz 25 October, 2014
There is no evidence Talb's Malta
clothing came from Gauci's shop or that
he was on Malta when the purchase
was made (even if you accept it was the
23/11/88). Abu Talb left Malta on the
day of the Autumn Leaves arrests
26/10/88. Did Gauci really sell it prior to
the bombing? There is no till roll or
ROC. As I have demonstrated RARDE
scientists had mastered time-travel. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2014 1:56 pm Post subject:
CIA drug runners plant bomb? Lockerbie Inside Story: Former CIA Iraq/Libya agent Susan Lindauer on @BCfmRadio tonight http://youtu.be/pvqjdaO9U8c
Author of 'Extreme Prejudice' Susan Lindauer on the CIA & UK TV lies about Libya and Lockerbie - Interview with Susan Lindauer, former CIA officer and author of 'Extreme Prejudice'. The Lockerbie crash was not instigated by Libyans but by rogue CIA officers, to kill off DIA & CIA officers on plane returning to Washington who that knew that rogue officers had 'gone rogue' and were taking large amounts of money from drugs for their own purposes: Black Budget money; Islamic terrorists and hostages; CIA dealing drugs to pay for Black Ops; shadow government; Oliver North; Iran Contra; Ahmed Jibril, Abu Nidal and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command); how Libya used to be; film 'Kill the Messenger'; book 'Dark Alliance' by Gary Webb. BCfm win 'Best Small Station 2014' award from the Radio Academy
The drug runners' bomb? Lockerbie Inside Story Former CIA Iraq/Libya agent Susan Lindauer
"FOR THREE YEARS, I've had a feeling that if Chuck hadn't been on that plane, it wouldn't have been bombed," says Beulah McKee, 75. Her bitterness has still not subsided. But seated in the parlor of her house in Trafford, Pennsylvania, the house where her son was born 43 years ago, she struggles to speak serenely. "I know that's not what our President wants me to say," she admits.
George Bush's letter of condolence, written almost four months after the shattered remains of Pan Am Flight 103 fell on Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, expressed the usual "my heart goes out to you" sorrow. "No action by this government can restore the loss you have suffered," he concluded. But deep inside, Mrs. McKee suspects it was a government action gone horribly awry that indirectly led to her only son's death. "I've never been satisfied at ( all by what the people in Washington told me," she says.
Today, as the U.S. spearheads the U.N.-sanctioned embargo against Libya for not handing over two suspects in the bombing, Mrs. McKee wonders if Chuck's background contains the secret of why this plane was targeted. If her suspicions are correct, Washington may not be telling the entire story. Major Charles Dennis McKee, called "Tiny" by his Army intelligence friends, was a burly giant and a superstar in just about every kind of commando training offered to American military personnel. He completed the rugged Airborne and Ranger schools, graduated first in his class from the Special Forces qualification course, and served with the Green Berets. In Beirut he was identified merely as a military attache assigned to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). But his hulking physique didn't fit such a low- profile diplomatic post. Friends there remember him as a "walking arsenal" of guns and knives. His real assignment reportedly was to work with the CIA in reconnoitering the American hostages in Lebanon and then, if feasible, to lead a daring raid that would rescue them.
McKee's thick, 37-page Army dossier contains so many blacked-out words that it's hard to glean the danger he faced. Surviving the censor's ink was his title, "Team Chief." Under "Evaluation," it was written that he "performs constantly in the highest-stress environment with clear operational judgment and demeanor . . . Especially strong in accomplishing the mission with minimal guidance and supervision . . . Continues to perform one of the most hazardous and demanding jobs in the Army."
For Beulah McKee the mystery deepened six months after Chuck's death, when she received a letter from another U.S. agent in Beirut. It was signed "John Carpenter," a name the Pentagon says it can't further identify. Although the letter claimed that Chuck's presence on the Pan Am plane was unrelated to the bombing, Carpenter's message only stirred her suspicions. "I cannot comment on Chuck's work," he wrote, "because his work lives on. God willing, in time his labors will bear fruit and you will learn the true story of his heroism and courage."
Chuck had given no clues about his work. Back home in November for Thanksgiving three weeks before he perished, he wouldn't even see his friends. "I don't want to mingle, so I don't have to answer any questions," he told his mother. "Anyway, he didn't have time," she recalls. "He stayed up till 3 every morning studying reports. And when he flew back to Beirut, all he said was, 'Don't worry, Mom. Soon I'll be out from under all this pressure.' "
Almost immediately after the Pan Am bombing, which killed the 259 people aboard the plane and 11 more on the ground, the prime suspect was Ahmed Jibril, the roly-poly boss of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (P.F.L.P.-G.C.). Two months earlier, West German police had arrested 16 members of his terrorist organization. Seized during the raids was a plastic bomb concealed in a Toshiba cassette player, similar to the one that blew up Flight 103. There was other evidence pointing to Jibril. His patron was Syria. His banker for the attack on the Pan Am plane appeared to be Iran. U.S. intelligence agents even traced a wire transfer of several million dollars to a bank account in Vienna belonging to the P.F.L.P.-G.C. Iran's motive seemed obvious enough. The previous July, the U.S.S. Vincennes had mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf, killing all 298 aboard.
Suddenly, last November, the U.S. Justice Department blamed the bombing on two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah. The scenario prompted President Bush to remark, "The Syrians took a bum rap on this." It also triggered an outcry from the victims' families, who claimed that pointing the finger at Libya was a political ploy designed to reward Syria for siding with the U.S. in the gulf war and to help win the release of the hostages. Even Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's investigation of the bombing, told the New York Times it was "outrageous" to pin the whole thing on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
A four-month investigation by Time has disclosed evidence that raises new questions about the case. Among the discoveries:
-- According to an FBI field report from Germany, the suitcase originating in Malta that supposedly contained the bomb may not have been transferred to Pan Am Flight 103 in Frankfurt, as charged in the indictment of the two Libyans. Instead, the bomb-laden bag may have been substituted in Frankfurt for an innocent piece of luggage.
-- The rogue bag may have been placed on board the plane by Jibril's group with the help of Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian drug dealer who was cooperating with the U.S.'s Drug Enforcement Administration in a drug sting operation. Al- Kassar thus may have been playing both sides of the fence.
< -- Jibril and his group may have targeted that flight because on board was an intelligence team led by Charles McKee, whose job was to find and rescue the hostages.
Investigators initially focused their efforts on examining the procedures in the baggage-loading area at Frankfurt's international airport. But risking the transfer of an unaccompanied, bomb-laden suitcase to a connecting flight did not jibe with the precautions terrorists usually take. Security officers using video cameras routinely keep watch over the area. An intricate network of computerized conveyors, the most sophisticated baggage-transfer system in the world, shunts some 60,000 suitcases a day between loading bays. Every piece of luggage is logged minute by minute from one position to the next, so its journey through the airport is carefully monitored. The bags are then X-rayed by the airline before being put aboard a plane.
But the U.S. government's charges against al-Megrahi and Fhimah don't explain how the bronze-colored Samsonite suitcase, dispatched via Air Malta, eluded Frankfurt's elaborate airport security system. Instead, the indictment zeroes in on two tiny pieces of forensic evidence -- a fingernail-size fragment of green plastic from a Swiss digital timer, and a charred piece of shirt.
Even though investigators previously thought the bomb was probably detonated by a barometric trigger (considered much more reliable, especially in winter, when flights are frequently delayed and connections missed), a Swiss timer was traced to Libya. The shirt, which presumably had been wrapped around the bomb inside the suitcase, was traced to a boutique in Malta called Mary's House. The owner identified al-Megrahi as the shirt's purchaser, although he originally confused al-Megrahi with a Palestinian terrorist arrested in Sweden.
It was the computer printout produced by FAG, the German company that operates the sophisticated luggage-transfer system, that finally nailed down the indictment of the two Libyans. The printout, discovered months after the bombing, purportedly proved that their suitcase sent from Malta was logged in at Coding Station 206 shortly after 1 p.m. and then routed to Gate 44 in Terminal B, where it was put aboard the Pan Am jet. But a "priority" teletype sent from the U.S. embassy in Bonn to the FBI director in Washington on Oct. 23, 1989, reveals that despite the detailed computer records, considerable uncertainty surrounded the movement of this suitcase.
TIME has obtained a copy of the five-page FBI message, which states, "This computer entry does not indicate the origin of the bag which was sent for loading on board Pan Am 103. Nor does it indicate that the bag was actually loaded on Pan Am 103. It indicates only that a bag of unknown origin was sent from Coding Station 206 at 1:07 p.m. to a position from which it was supposed to be loaded on Pan Am 103."
The FBI message further explains that a handwritten record kept by a baggage handler at Coding Station 206 was even less specific about what happened to the suitcase. "It is noted," the teletype continues, "that the handwritten duty sheet indicates only that the luggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180. There is no indication how much baggage was unloaded or where the luggage was sent." The FBI agent's report concludes, "There remains the possibility that no luggage was transferred from Air Malta 180 to Pan Am 103."
Also described in the teletype is an incident that "may provide insight into the possibilities of a rogue bag being inserted into the baggage system." On a guided tour of the baggage area in September 1989, it was disclosed, detective inspector Watson McAteer of the Scottish police and FBI special agent Lawrence G. Whitaker "observed an individual approach Coding Station 206 with a single piece of luggage, place the luggage in a luggage container, encode a destination into the computer and leave without making any notation on a duty sheet." This convinced the two investigators that a rogue suitcase could have been "sent to Pan Am 103 either before or after the unloading of Air Malta 180."
Lee Kreindler, the lead attorney for the victims' families, who are suing Pan Am for $7 billion, says he can prove that the suitcase from Malta was put aboard Flight 103. He charges that a gross security failure by Pan Am, which went bankrupt in January 1991 and later folded, contributed to the disaster.
But it was the rogue-bag theory that was pursued by Pan Am's law firm, Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives, representing the airline's insurers. To piece together their version of how the bomb was planted, Pan Am's lawyers hired Interfor, Inc., a New York City firm specializing in international intelligence and security. If it hadn't been for the government's implausible plottings revealed during the Iran-contra hearings, Interfor's findings might be dismissed as a private eye's imagination run amuck -- especially considering the controversial background of the company's president, Juval Aviv.
Now 45 and an American citizen, Aviv claims to have headed the Mossad hit squad that hunted down and killed the Arab terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Israeli and U.S. intelligence sources deny that Aviv was ever associated with Mossad. However, working for Pan Am, he spent more than six months tracking the terrorists who the airline now alleges are responsible for the bombing. While his report has been written off as fiction by many intelligence officials, a number of its findings appear well documented.
The central figure emerging from the Interfor investigation is a 44-year-old Syrian arms and drug trafficker, Monzer al-Kassar. His brother-in-law is Syria's intelligence chief, Ali Issa Duba, and his wife Raghda is related to Syrian President Hafez Assad.
Al-Kassar has many passports and identities. Most important, he was part of the covert network run by U.S. Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. During the Iran- contra hearings, it was revealed that al-Kassar was given $1.5 million to purchase weapons. Questioned about al-Kassar, former U.S. National Security Adviser John Poindexter said, "When you're buying arms, you often have to deal with people you might not want to go to dinner with."
It was through al-Kassar's efforts, or so he claimed, that two French hostages were released from Lebanon in 1986 in exchange for an arms shipment to Iran. The deal caught the eye of a freewheeling CIA unit code-named COREA, based in Wiesbaden, Germany. This special unit was reported to be trafficking in drugs and arms in order to gain access to terrorist groups.
For its cover overseas, COREA used various front companies: Stevens Mantra Corp., AMA Industries, Wildwood Video and Condor Television Ltd. Condor paid its bills with checks drawn on the First American Bank (account No. 2843900) in Washington, D.C., which was subsequently discovered to be a subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
According to Aviv, agents in COREA's Wiesbaden headquarters allowed al- Kassar to continue running his smuggling routes to American cities in exchange for help in obtaining the release of the American hostages being held in Lebanon. At about the same time, al-Kassar's drug-smuggling enterprise was being used by the U.S.'s DEA in a sting operation. The DEA was monitoring heroin shipments from Lebanon to Detroit, Los Angeles and Houston, which have large Arab populations, in an attempt to nail the U.S. dealers.
By the fall of 1988, al-Kassar's operation had been spotted by P.F.L.P.-G.C. leader Ahmed Jibril, who had just taken on the assignment from Tehran to avenge the U.S. downing of its Airbus. A CIA undercover agent in Tripoli reported that Jibril also obtained Gaddafi's support. According to Mossad, Jibril dined with al-Kassar at a Paris restaurant and secured a reluctant promise of assistance in planting a bomb aboard an as yet unselected American transatlantic jet.
Al-Kassar's hesitancy was understandable. He wouldn't want anything to disrupt his profitable CIA-assisted drug and arms business. Presumably he was also worried because West German police had just raided the Popular Front hideouts around Dusseldorf and Frankfurt. Among those arrested: the Jordanian technical wizard and bombmaker Marwan Khreesat.
The bomb that ended up on the Pan Am jet could have been assembled by Khreesat. However, last month the Palestine Liberation Organization reported that it was built by Khaisar Haddad (a.k.a. Abu Elias), who is also a member of Jibril's Popular Front. Haddad purchased the detonator, the P.L.O. said, on the Beirut black market for more than $60,000.
The detonator, in fact, is considered one of the main keys to the bombing puzzle. Thomas Hayes, a leading forensics expert, did the main detective work on a minute piece of timer recovered from the wreckage by Scottish authorities. In a recent book about the Lockerbie investigation, On the Trail of Terror, British journalist David Leppard reports that "Hayes is not prepared to commit himself publicly on whether the bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 was originally made by Khreesat and subsequently modified by timers of the sort found in possession of the Libyans." In fact, adds Leppard, "his authoritative view is that not enough of the bomb's timing device has been recovered to make a definite judgment about whether it was a dual device containing a barometric switch and a timer, or a single trigger device, which was activated by just a timer."
James M. Shaughnessy, Pan Am's lead defense lawyer, has tried to drive a wedge into this opening left by Hayes, thereby casting further doubt on Libya's responsibility for the bombing. Britain's High Court ruled that Pan Am's lawyers could depose Hayes. However, in a last-minute legal maneuver by the Scottish authorities, the deposition was blocked for reasons of national security. Pan Am's lawyers are now appealing that decision.
But regardless of the bomb's design, al-Kassar still didn't know how and when Jibril planned to use it. A Mossad agent, according to Aviv, first tipped off U.S. and West German intelligence agents that a terrorist attack would be made on an American passenger plane departing from Frankfurt on or about Dec. 18. Al-Kassar quickly figured out that Pan Am Flight 103 was the most likely target and, playing both sides of the fence, notified the COREA unit. His warning corroborated an earlier bomb threat, involving an unspecified Pan Am flight from Frankfurt, telephoned to the U.S. embassy in Helsinki.
Precisely how a rogue bag containing the bomb eluded the Frankfurt airport security system, Aviv doesn't know. Presumably this required the help of baggage handlers there. So in January 1990 he and a former U.S. Army polygraphist flew to Frankfurt, accompanied by Shaughnessy. At the Sheraton Conference Center, adjoining the airport, the polygraphist administered lie- detector tests to Pan Am baggage handlers Kilin Caslan Tuzcu and Roland O'Neill. Pan Am had determined that they were the only ones who were in a position to switch suitcases and place the bomb-laden bag aboard Flight 103.
Tuzcu took the test three times, and O'Neill took it twice. As the polygraphist later testified before a federal grand jury in Washington, Tuzcu "was not truthful when he said he did not switch the suitcases." The polygraphist also told the grand jury, "It is my opinion that Roland O'Neill wasn't truthful when he stated he did not see the suitcase being switched, and when he stated that he did not know what was in the switched suitcase." The two men continued to claim ignorance of a baggage switch.
After flunking their lie-detector tests, both were sent on a bogus errand by Pan Am to London, where it was assumed they would be arrested. But British authorities refused to even interrogate the pair. According to Leppard, Tuzcu and O'Neill were simply "scapegoats" and were never "considered serious suspects." They returned to Frankfurt that same night.
If the bomb-laden luggage replaced an innocent bag, what happened to the displaced suitcase? On Dec. 21, 1988, the day of the bombing, one of Pan Am's Berlin-based pilots was about to head home to Seattle, Washington, for Christmas when he received orders to fly to Karachi first. He had with him two identical Samsonite suitcases full of presents. At the Berlin airport, he $ asked Pan Am to send them directly to Seattle. "Rush" tags, marked for Flights 637 to Frankfurt, 107 to London and 123 to Seattle, were affixed to the bags.
It so happened that the flight from Berlin to Frankfurt was delayed. While all the passengers ultimately made the connection to London, 11 suitcases, including the pilot's two bags, remained behind in Frankfurt. They were entered into the airport computer system and rerouted via the Pan Am flight. But only one of the pilot's suitcases was recovered at Lockerbie. The other had been mysteriously left behind in Frankfurt, and arrived safely in Seattle a day later. That story, which TIME has corroborated, doesn't prove Pan Am's claim that terrorists used al-Kassar's drug pipeline to pull a suitcase switch in Frankfurt. But it does support the theory that a rogue bag was inserted into the automated baggage-control system, as the secret FBI report indicates was possible.
TO GATHER FURTHER EVIDENCE that the bomb was not contained in an unaccompanied bag from Malta, Pan Am lawyer Shaughnessy recently interviewed under oath 20 officials who were in Malta on Dec. 21, 1988, including the airport security commander, the bomb-disposal engineer who inspected all the baggage, the general manager of ground operations of Air Malta, the head loader of Flight 180 and the three check-in agents. Their records showed that no unaccompanied suitcases were put aboard the flight, and some of the staff Shaughnessy interviewed are prepared to testify under oath that there was no bag that day destined for Pan Am Flight 103.
Although Shaughnessy subpoenaed the FBI, CIA, DEA and four other government agencies for all documents pertaining to both the bombing of Flight 103 and the narcotics sting operation, he has been repeatedly rebuffed by the Justice Department for reasons of national security. Even so, with the help of investigators hired after Aviv, he has managed to obtain some of the documents needed to defend Pan Am's insurers in the trial scheduled to begin April 27 at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The stakes are enormous, and the incentive is high for Shaughnessy to demonstrate the government's responsibility for the bombing. In addition to defending against the compensation claims of $7 billion, he is bringing a claim against the government for failing to give warning that Pan Am had been targeted by the terrorists.
The man who has been Shaughnessy's key witness in these proceedings is hiding in fear of his life in a small town in Europe. His real name is Lester Knox Coleman III, although as a former spy for the dia and DEA he was known as Thomas Leavy and by the code name Benjamin B. A year ago, the stockily built, bearded Coleman filed an affidavit describing the narcotics sting operation that Shaughnessy claims was infiltrated by Jibril.
It wasn't until July 1990, when Coleman spotted a newspaper picture of one of the Pan Am victims and recognized the young Lebanese as one of his drug- running informants, that he realized he might be of assistance to Pan Am. He was also looking for work. Two months earlier he had been deactivated by the DIA after being arrested by the FBI for using his DIA cover name, Thomas Leavy, on a passport application. Coleman claims that the DIA instructed him to do this. "But such trumped-up charges are frequently used to keep spooks quiet," says A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a Pentagon whistle-blower and a director of the Fund for Constitutional Government in Washington, which has been looking into Coleman's case.
Coleman spent three days in jail. His official pretrial services report, filed with the U.S. District Court of Illinois for the Northern District, began, "Although Mr. Coleman's employment history sounds quite improbable, information he gave has proven to be true."
Raised in Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia, Coleman, now 48, was recruited by the dia and assigned to the still classified humint (Human Intelligence) MC-10 operation in the Middle East. In early 1987 he was transferred from Lebanon to Cyprus, where he began his work for the DEA. However, he says he was instructed not to inform the DEA there of his role as a DIA undercover agent. By this time even the DIA suspected that the freewheeling narcotics sting operation was getting out of hand.
In Nicosia, Coleman saw the supposedly controlled shipments of heroin, called kourah in Lebanon -- inspiration for the CIA operation's code name COREA -- grow into a torrent. The drugs were delivered by couriers who arrived on the overnight ferry from the Lebanese port of Jounieh. After receiving their travel orders from the DEA, the couriers were escorted to the Larnaca airport by the Cypriot national police and sent on their way to Frankfurt and other European transit points. The DEA testified at hearings in Washington that no "controlled deliveries" of drugs through Frankfurt were made in 1988.
Coleman's DEA front in Nicosia, called the Eurame Trading Co. Ltd., was located on the top floor of a high-rise apartment near the U.S. embassy. He says the intelligence agency paid him with unsigned Visa traveler's checks issued by B.C.C.I. in Luxembourg. Additionally, the DEA country attache in Cyprus, Michael Hurley, kept a drawer full of cash in his office at the embassy, which he parceled out to Coleman and to a parade of confidential informants, known by such nicknames as "Rambo Dreamer," "Taxi George" and "Fadi the Captain." Hurley admitted in a Justice Department affidavit that he paid Coleman $74,000 for information.
The informants, Coleman reported, were under the control of Ibrahim el-Jorr. "He was a Wild West character who wore cowboy boots and tooled around in a Chevy with expired Texas plates," he says. "I was told ((by el-Jorr)) that in the Frankfurt airport the suitcases containing the narcotics were put on flights to the U.S. by agents or other sources working in the baggage area. From my personal observation, Germany's BKA ((Bundeskriminalamt, the German federal police)) was also involved, as was Her Majesty's Customs and Excise service in the United Kingdom."
After deciding to become a witness for Pan Am, Coleman phoned a friend, Hartmut Mayer, a German intelligence agent in Cyprus, and asked if he knew how the bomb got aboard Flight 103. Mayer suggested calling a "Mr. Harwick" and a "Mr. Pinsdorf," who Mayer said were running the investigation at the Frankfurt airport. "I spoke with Pinsdorf," says Coleman. "From his conversation I learned that BKA had serious concerns that the drug sting operation originating in Cyprus had caused the bomb to be placed on the Pan Am plane." Mayer and Pinsdorf gave depositions last year at the request of Pan Am. But the German Federal Ministry of the Interior ruled they couldn't discuss law-enforcement matters relating to other nations. Mayer did say he knew Coleman.
"It took three informants just to keep tabs on al-Kassar," claims Coleman. He said the informants reported that al-Kassar and the Syrian President's brother Rifaat Assad were taking over drug production in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, under protection of the Syrian army. Coleman also says he learned that the principal European transfer point for their heroin shipments was the Frankfurt airport.
In December 1988 al-Kassar picked up some news that threatened to shut down his smuggling operation. Charles McKee's counterterrorist team in Beirut that was investigating the possible rescue of the nine American hostages had got wind of his CIA connection. The team was outraged that the COREA unit in Wiesbaden was doing business with a Syrian who had close terrorist connections and might endanger their planned rescue attempt.
Besides McKee, a key member of the team was Matthew Gannon, 34, the CIA's deputy station chief in Beirut and a rising star in the agency. After venting their anger to the CIA in Langley about al-Kassar, McKee and Gannon were further upset by headquarters' failure to respond. Its silence was surprising because Gannon's father-in-law Thomas Twetten, who now commands the CIA's worldwide spy network, was then chief of Middle East operations based in Langley. He was also Ollie North's CIA contact.
MCKEE AND GANNON, joined by three other members of the team, decided to fly back to Virginia unannounced and expose the COREA unit's secret deal with al- Kassar. They packed $500,000 in cash provided for their rescue mission, as well as maps and photographs of the secret locations where the hostages were being held. Then the five-man team booked seats on Pan Am 103 out of London, arranging to fly there on a connecting flight from Cyprus.
McKee's mother says she is sure her son's sudden decision to fly home was not known to his superiors in Virginia. "This was the first time Chuck ever telephoned me from Beirut," she says. "I was flabbergasted. 'Meet me at the Pittsburgh airport tomorrow night,' he said. 'It's a surprise.' Always before he would wait until he was back in Virginia to call and say he was coming home."
Apparently the team's movements were being tracked by the Iranians. A story that appeared in the Arabic newspaper Al-Dustur on May 22, 1989, disclosed that the terrorists set out to kill McKee and his team because of their planned hostage-rescue attempt. The author, Ali Nuri Zadeh, reported that "an American agent known as David Love-Boy ((he meant Lovejoy)), who had struck bargains on weapons to the benefit of Iran," passed information to the Iranian embassy in Beirut about the team's travel plans. Reported to be a onetime State Department security officer, Lovejoy is alleged to have become a double agent with CIA connections in Libya. His CIA code name was said to be "Nutcracker."
Lawyer Shaughnessy uncovered similar evidence. His affidavit, filed with the federal district court in Brooklyn, New York, asserts that in November and ; December 1988 the U.S. government intercepted a series of telephone calls from Lovejoy to the Iranian charge d'affaires in Beirut advising him of the team's movements. Lovejoy's last call came on Dec. 20, allegedly informing the Iranians that the team would be on Pan Am Flight 103 the following day.
In his book, Lockerbie: The Tragedy of Flight 103, Scottish radio reporter David Johnston disclosed that British army searches of the wreckage recovered more than $500,000 cash, believed to belong to the hostage-rescue team, and what appeared to be a detailed plan of a building in Beirut, with two crosses marking the location of the hostages. The map also pinpointed the positions of sentries guarding the building and contained a description of how the building might be taken.
Johnston also described how CIA agents helicoptered into Lockerbie shortly after the crash seeking the remnants of McKee's suitcase. "Having found part of their quarry," he wrote, "the CIA had no intention of following the exacting rules of evidence employed by the Scottish police. They took the suitcase and its contents into the chopper and flew with it to an unknown destination." Several days later the empty suitcase was returned to the same spot, where Johnston reported that it was "found" by two British Transport Police officers, "who in their ignorance were quite happy to sign statements about the case's discovery."
Richard Gazarik, a reporter for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Tribune- Review, spent many months probing the major's secret mission. He found, hidden inside the lining of McKee's wallet, which was retrieved from the Pan Am wreckage and returned to his mother, what he assumes was McKee's code name, Chuck Capone, and the gangster code names (Nelson, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde) of the other team members.
The theory that Jibril targeted Flight 103 in order to kill the hostage- rescue team is supported by two independent intelligence experts. M. Gene Wheaton, a retired U.S. military-intelligence officer with 17 years' duty in the Middle East, sees chilling similarities between the Lockerbie crash and the suspicious DC-8 crash in Gander, Newfoundland, which killed 248 American soldiers in 1985. Wheaton is serving as investigator for the families of the victims of that crash. "A couple of my old black ops buddies in the Pentagon believe the Pan Am bombers were gunning for McKee's hostage-rescue team," he says. "But they were told to shift the focus of their investigation because it revealed an embarrassing breakdown in security." The FBI says it investigated the theory that McKee's team was targeted and found no evidence to support it.
Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director and co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, believes that the presence of the team on Flight 103 is a clue that should not be ignored. His contacts at Langley agree. "It's like the loose thread of a sweater," he says. "Pull on it, and the whole thing may unravel." In any case, Marchetti believes the bombing of Flight 103 could have been avoided. "The Mossad knew about it and didn't give proper warning," he says. "The CIA knew about it and screwed up."
The CIA may still be trying to find out more information about why McKee and Gannon suddenly decided to fly home. Last year three CIA agents, reportedly following up on their hostage-rescue mission, were shot dead in a Berlin hotel while waiting to meet a Palestinian informant.
Beulah McKee has given up trying to find out if Pan Am's bombers were after her son, although she says, "The government's secrecy can't close off my mind." Twice she called and questioned Gannon's widow Susan, who like her husband and her father Tom Twetten worked for the CIA. "The last time, I was accused of opening my mouth too much," says Mrs. McKee.
Yet memories die hard, and mothers never quite get accustomed to losing a child. Beulah McKee keeps her son's bedroom all tidied up, as if she still expected him to come home. His pictures, diplomas, miltary awards, even his chrome-plated bowie knife, decorate the walls. In a cardboard carton under the made-up bed are the heavily censored service records of her son, which may contain the secret of why Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky over Scotland.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2015 8:15 pm Post subject:
Cor blimey! More 'evidence' crops up.
But take note, neither the Telegraph nor the Guardian have a 'Comments' section on their articles. Wonder why?? The 'Express' does, but they would, wouldn't they?
But hang on! All us Truthers better head for the hills, 'cos I've heard (from a very reputable source) they've sussed us out as being behind the 9/11 attacks! _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2017 1:27 am Post subject:
Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie - Inside the DIA (2009)
Paperback
by Donald Goddard, Lester K. Coleman
Lester Knox Coleman is the first American citizen since the Vietnam War to seek political asylum in another country. Hounded by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Middle East heroin traffickers, Coleman is a victim of the biggest international cover-up in modern times. In the spring of 1988, Coleman was on a mission for the world's most secretive and well-funded espionage agency - the Defence Intelligence Agency. Coleman had been ordered to spy on the DEA in Cyprus which, along with the CIA, was running a series of "controlled deliveries" of Lebanese heroin through the airports of Frankfurt and London en route to America. Coleman discovered that security of this "sting" operation had been breached and warned the American Embassy that a disaster was waiting to happen. It was ignored. Seven months later, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie. Among the dead was a DEA courier. Over the last four years Washington has ensured that the blame for the bombing rests with Libyan terrorists and negligent Pan Am officials. With Pan Am and their insurers fighting this version all the way, it was never likely that Coleman's experiences in Cyprus would go unnoticed. In 1991 America's state security apparatus - the octopus - made its move. Donald Goddard is the author of "Joey", "The Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer", "All Fall Down", "Undercover" and "The Insider".# _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2017 1:43 pm Post subject:
'Lester Knox Coleman is the first American citizen since the Vietnam War to seek political asylum in another country. Hounded by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Middle East heroin traffickers, Coleman is a victim of the biggest international cover-up in modern times....'
I'm sure it's a great book, but the blurb doesn't seem right. What about Michael Ruppert (sought refuge in Venezuela), Jimmy Walters (Europe) and of course Edward Snowden? _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
One of Pierre Péan's most significant investigations revealed how the FBI conspired to incriminate Libya for the sabotage of both Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772. In March 2001, Le Monde Diplomatique published the article, just after the Lockerbie bombing trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands had ended with the conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on the strength of just one piece of hard evidence: a tiny fragment of a timing device manufactured by the Swiss firm MEBO.
Two years earlier, Abdullah al-Senussi and five other Libyans were tried and convicted in absentia by a Paris court for the UTA Flight 772 bombing. Péan claimed there was something wrong:
"It is striking to witness the similarity of the discoveries, by the FBI, of the scientific proof of the two aircraft that were sabotaged: the Pan Am Boeing 747 and the UTA DC-10. Among the thousands or rather tens of thousands of pieces of debris collected near the crash sites, just one printed circuit board (PCB) fragment was found in each case, which carried enough information to allow its identification: MEBO for the Boeing 747 and "TY" (from Taiwan) for the DC-10."
Péan went on to accuse Juge Jean-Louis Bruguière of ignoring the results of an analysis by Claude Colisti of the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire (DCPJ) – one of the world's foremost explosives experts – that the "TY" timer fragment had no trace of explosives residue, and could not therefore have been connected to the bomb that destroyed UTA Flight 772. Furthermore, neither a forensic inquiry by the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) nor an examination by the scientific laboratory of the Préfecture de Police (PP) could make any connection between the timer fragment and the bomb. According to Péan, Juge Bruguière had therefore taken at face value the word of an FBI political operative (Thomas Thurman), who had been discredited in 1997 by the US Inspector-General, Michael Bromwich, and told never again to appear in court as an expert witness, rather than accept the findings of French forensic experts.
Pierre Péan was interviewed on French TV channel ARTE info on 28 August 2007 following the admission by MEBO engineer Ulrich Lumpert that he had handed over a prototype MST-13 timer to Lockerbie investigators in 1989.
It was revealed at the Lockerbie bombing trial that the British scientist, Dr Thomas Hayes, had also failed to test the MEBO timer fragment for explosives residue. Such reckless disregard for the integrity of forensic evidence would have had the most profound effects upon the Scottish judicial process in relation to Megrahi's second appeal against conviction. However, in August 2009 Megrahi agreed to abandon his second appeal, was granted "compassionate release" by Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, and flew back to Tripoli. Thurman's fabricated evidence has never therefore been exposed in court.
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Pierre_P%C3%A9an#FBI_fabricated_evidence_a gainst_Libya _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2018 2:03 pm Post subject:
Vital Lockerbie evidence ‘was made AFTER the doomed flight crashed’: Circuit board used to convict Libyan over 1988 bombing wasn’t manufactured until 1991, documentary claims amid calls for a public inquiry
Documentary maker and former Scottish policeman are reviewing evidence
Key circuit board presented as evidence was 'probably made in 1991' say experts
Relatives' spokesman calls for full public inquiry 'before it's too late'
By MARCELLO MEGA FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 23:58, 16 December 2018 | UPDATED: 08:19, 17 December 2018
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6502363/Vital-Lockerbie-evide nce-doomed-flight.html
Evidence used in the trial of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is unconnected to the case, it has been claimed.
A circuit board used in the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi was probably made after the atrocity, investigators say.
The claims are backed by testimony from a British expert and by tests at a police forensics lab in Zurich.
Documentary-maker Bill Cran and his lead investigator George Thomson, a former Scottish police officer, are re-examining the 1988 bombing and later court case for a forthcoming film.
Thomson, 73, was part of Megrahi’s defence team who were preparing the appeal abandoned by the Libyan agent in 2009 to secure his release on compassionate grounds.
This photo shows a small fragment of a circuit timer, PT/35(b), that was allegedly found among the debris of Pan Am 103 near the town of Lockerbie after the 1988 crash. According to Richard Marquise, the FBI Agent who led the US side of the Lockerbie investigation, without PT/35(b), there would 'have been no indictment'. But it is claimed fresh forensic scrutiny has established the fragment was from a type of circuit-board not patented until 1991. +7
This photo shows a small fragment of a circuit timer, PT/35(b), that was allegedly found among the debris of Pan Am 103 near the town of Lockerbie after the 1988 crash. According to Richard Marquise, the FBI Agent who led the US side of the Lockerbie investigation, without PT/35(b), there would 'have been no indictment'. But it is claimed fresh forensic scrutiny has established the fragment was from a type of circuit-board not patented until 1991.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi remains the only man to have been found guilty for the 270 murders but a Scottish case review in 2007 found no reasonable court could have concluded he was guilty on the evidence presented at his trial +7
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi remains the only man to have been found guilty for the 270 murders but a Scottish case review in 2007 found no reasonable court could have concluded he was guilty on the evidence presented at his trial
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi pictured clutching his release papers after being released from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds when he developed cancer +7
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi pictured clutching his release papers after being released from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds when he developed cancer
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Mr Cran and Mr Thomson hope to release their film next year. Much of the focus is on the tiny circuit-board fragment, said to be part of the timer that triggered the bomb. It was key forensic evidence in the case because the timers had been sold to Libya.
The circuit board was linked to Swiss electronics firm Mebo, but it is claimed fresh forensic scrutiny has established the fragment did not match the Mebo boards.
It also appears the fragment was from a type of circuit-board not patented until 1991.
The British expert, who has asked not to be named but was interviewed for Cran’s film, said the fragment contained traces of copper foil, while the older Mebo timers sold to Libya did not.
The Maid Of The Sea came down thirty years ago this week and a new documentary claims crucial evidence was fabricated +7
The Maid Of The Sea came down thirty years ago this week and a new documentary claims crucial evidence was fabricated
Eyewitnesses described 12 to 14 houses on fire from jet fuel which rained down on the town +7
Eyewitnesses described 12 to 14 houses on fire from jet fuel which rained down on the town
Eleven people in Lockerbie were killed by the airliner, which crashed between rows of houses +7
Eleven people in Lockerbie were killed by the airliner, which crashed between rows of houses
Investigators inspect cockpit of plane that crashed over Lockerbie
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He said the technique of adding foil coating to circuit boards only emerged at the end of the 1980s and was not patented until 1991.
The fragment of circuit board was said to match those made my Mebo and sold only to Libya and East Germany no later than 1986.Its co-founder Edwin Bollier also uncovered new evidence after winning the right to obtain Government files on the firm.
The British government released this photograph of Al-Megrahi after the bombing which claimed 270 lives in 1988 +7
The British government released this photograph of Al-Megrahi after the bombing which claimed 270 lives in 1988
Through those documents, it is claimed a named member of the Swiss secret services visited Mebo in June 1989 and took away a circuit board he passed on to US investigators.
The fragment, known as PT35b, entered the chain of evidence in October 1990, and later that month the CIA returned to Mebo and obtained circuit boards.
Thomson said: ‘Somehow, the Americans knew 16 months or so before the fragment was found to send a local agent to Mebo to secure a circuit board. You have to wonder whether the investigation was following a prepared script.’
The Swiss documents also reveals that the Zurich lab found: ‘The fragment used as evidence in the Lockerbie trial does not match the timers made by Mebo.’
Dr Jim Swire, 82, spokesman for the UK relatives among the 270 who died on December 21, 1988, said: ‘This evidence underlines that PT35b did not come from boards made by Mebo and sold to Libya.
'We need a full public inquiry to explore this and to deliver truth and justice before it’s too late for those of us who have the right to know why our loved ones died.’
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is considering ordering a posthumous appeal on behalf of Megrahi’s family. In 2007, it found no reasonable court could have concluded he was guilty on the evidence led at trial.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2018 1:06 pm Post subject:
by email wrote:
Dr. Hans Koechler, President of the International Progress
organisation in Vienna and a friend of mine was assigned the role by the
Secretary General of the UN to observe the Lockerbie trial and file a
report. He did and stated that it was clear to him that the CIA and
British intelligence services were interfering in the trial and
manipuating evidence and that it was not a fair trial and was political.
by Dr. Hans Köchler, University Professor, international observer of the International Progress Organization nominated by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the basis of Security Council resolution 1192 (1998)
Santiago de Chile, 3 February 2001/P/HK/17032
The undersigned observed the proceedings of the High Court of Justiciary at Camp Zeist (Netherlands) since the beginning on 5 May 2000 until the announcement of the verdict and sentence in the causa Her Majesty’s Advocate v Abdelbasset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah on 31 January 2001. He regularly attended the sessions of the Court, repeatedly met with the prosecution and defense teams, interviewed the Registrar and staff members of the Scottish Court Service at Kamp van Zeist, inspected HM Prison Zeist, met with the Governor and Deputy Governor of HM Prison Zeist and with the Chief of the Scottish Police at Kamp van Zeist. He interviewed the two accused Libyan nationals at the beginning of the trial and again — in separate meetings — after the passing of the verdict and sentence on 31 January 2001. All meetings were arranged through the Scottish Court Service. The undersigned further had access to the complete transcripts of the Court’s proceedings and exchanged notes with the additional international observer of the International Progress Organization, Mr. Robert Thabit, Esq.
On the basis of his first exploratory visit to Kamp van Zeist and of the interview with the two accused, the undersigned, in May 2000, sent a confidential message to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. He made no public comments during the entire period of the trial and did not seek a meeting with the panel of judges, Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean. He exercised his observer mission on the basis of respect of the constitutional independence of the judiciary and interpreted his mission — in the absence of any specific description of the tasks of international observers in the respective Security Council resolution — in the sense of evaluating the aspects of due process and fairness of the trial. He reached agreement on the nature of this observer mission with the additional observer of the International Progress Organization, Mr. Robert Thabit.
Based on his observations during the entire period of the trial and on the information obtained in the numerous meetings with the protagonists of the trial mentioned above, the undersigned presents the following evaluation in regard to the aspect of due process and the question of the fairness of the trial:
1. All administrative aspects of the trial were handled with great care, efficiency and professionalism by the staff of the Scottish Court Service at Kamp van Zeist. Apart from minor problems with simultaneous interpretation at the beginning of the trial, there were no major weaknesses that might have affected the fairness of the proceedings. The problems of interpretation were solved in a satisfactory manner. The Scottish Court Service did its best to assist the undersigned in the accomplishment of his observer mission.
2. The circumstances of detention of the two accused at Her Majesty’s Prison Zeist were in conformity with national legal requirements and international legal and human rights standards. According to the information given by the accused in a private interview with the undersigned, no people had access to them without their consent. In particular, the medical services and the medical care for the second accused (who needs permanent medication) were up to the required standard. Upon their special request, the undersigned sent a note about his meeting with the accused in May 2000 and conveyed their concerns in regard to certain political aspects of the United Nations arrangements and conditions for their coming to the Netherlands to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The Governor of HM Prison Zeist forwarded the undersigned’s confirmation note on the forwarding of this message to the two accused. The prison administration was fully co-operative in regard to the undersigned’s requests in the exercise of his observer mission.
3. The extraordinary length of detention of the two suspects / accused from the time of their arrival in the Netherlands until the beginning of the trial in May 2000 has constituted a serious problem in regard to the basic human rights of the two Libyan nationals under general European standards, in particular those of the European Convention on Human Rights. In general, the highly political circumstances of the trial and special security considerations related to the political nature of the trial may have had a detrimental effect on the rights of the accused, in particular in regard to the duration of administrative detention.
4. As far as the material aspects of due process and fairness of the trial are concerned, the presence of at least two representatives of a foreign government in the courtroom during the entire period of the trial was highly problematic. The two state prosecutors from the US Department of Justice were seated next to the prosecution team. They were not listed in any of the official information documents about the Court’s officers produced by the Scottish Court Service, yet they were seen talking to the prosecutors while the Court was in session, checking notes and passing on documents. For an independent observer watching this from the visitors’ gallery, this created the impression of “supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding, in certain cases, which documents (evidence) were to be released in open court or what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld (deleted).
5. This serious problem of due process became evident in the matter of the CIA cables concerning one of the Crown’s key witnesses, Mr. Giaka. Those cables were initially dismissed by the prosecution as “not relevant,” but proved to be of high relevance when finally (though only partially) released after a move from the part of the defense. Apart from this specific aspect — that seriously damaged the integrity of the whole legal procedure —it has become obvious that the presence of representatives of foreign governments in a Scottish courtroom (or any courtroom, for that matter) on the side of the prosecution team jeopardizes the independence and integrity of legal procedures and is not in conformity with the general standards of due process and fairness of the trial. As has become obvious to the undersigned, this presence has negatively impacted on the Court’s ability to find the truth; it has introduced a political element into the proceedings in the courtroom. This presence should never have been granted from the outset.
6. Another, though less serious, problem in regard to due process was the presence of foreign nationals on the side of the defense team in the courtroom during the whole period of the trial. Apart from the presence of an Arab interpreter (which was perfectly reasonable under aspects of fairness and efficiency of the proceedings), the presence of a Libyan lawyer who had held high posts in the Libyan government and who represented the Libyan Jamahiriya in its case v the United States and the United Kingdom at the International Court of Justice gave the trial a political aspect that should have been avoided by decision of the panel of judges, Though Mr. Maghour acted officially as Libyan defense lawyer for the accused Libyan nationals and although he was not seen by the undersigned as interacting with the Scottish defense lawyers during court proceedings, he had to be perceived as a kind of liaison official in a political sense. It has to be noted that the original Libyan defense lawyer, Dr. Ibrahim Legwell (chosen by the two suspects long before their transfer to the Netherlands), resigned under protest when the Libyan government introduced Mr. Maghour as new defense lawyer for the two accused. In sum, the presence of de facto governmental representatives of both sides in the courtroom gave the trial a highly political aura that should have been avoided by all means, at least as far as the actual proceedings in the courtroom were concerned. Again, as to the undersigned’s knowledge, the presence of foreign nationals on the side of the defense team was mentioned in no official briefing document of the Scottish Court Service.
7. It was a consistent pattern during the whole trial that — as an apparent result of political interests and considerations — efforts were undertaken to withhold substantial information from the Court. One of the most obvious cases in point was that of the former Libyan double agent, Abdul Majid Giaka, and the CIA cables related to him. Some of the cables were finally released after much insistence from the part of the defense, some were never made available. The Court was apparently content with this situation, which is hard to understand for an independent observer. It may never be fully known up to which extent relevant information was hidden from the Court. The most serious case, however, is related to the special defense launched by defense attorneys Taylor and Keen. It was officially stated by the Lord Advocate that substantial new information had been received from an unnamed foreign government relating to the defense case. The content of this information was never revealed, the requested specific documents were never provided by a foreign government. The alternative theory of the defense — leading to conclusions contradictory to those of the prosecution — was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and “national security” considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued — although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defense case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer. By not having pursued thoroughly and carefully an alternative theory, the Court seems to have accepted that the whole legal process was seriously flawed in regard to the requirements of objectivity and due process.
8. As a result of this situation, the undersigned has reached the conclusion that foreign governments or (secret) governmental agencies may have been allowed, albeit indirectly, to determine, to a considerable extent, which evidence was made available to the Court.
9. In the analysis of the undersigned, the strategy of the defense team by suddenly dropping its “special defense” and cancelling the appearance of almost all defense witnesses (in spite of the defense’s ambitious announcements made earlier during the trial) is totally incomprehensible; it puts into question the credibility of the defense’s actions and motives. In spite of repeated requests of the undersigned, the defense lawyers were not available for comment on this particular matter.
10. A general pattern of the trial consisted in the fact that virtually all people presented by the prosecution as key witnesses were proven to lack credibility to a very high extent, in certain cases even having openly lied to the Court. Particularly as regards Mr. Bollier and Mr. Giaka, there were so many inconsistencies in their statements and open contradictions to statements of other witnesses that the resulting confusion was much greater than any clarification that may have been obtained from parts of their statements. Their credibility as such was shaken. It seems highly arbitrary and irrational to choose only parts of their statements for the formulation of a verdict that requires certainty “beyond any reasonable doubt.”
11. The air of international power politics is present in the whole verdict of the panel of judges. In spite of the many reservations in the Opinion of the Court explaining the verdict itself, the guilty verdict in the case of the first accused is particularly incomprehensible in view of the admission by the judges themselves that the identification of the first accused by the Maltese shop owner was “not absolute” (formulation in Par. 89 of the Opinion) and that there was a “mass of conflicting evidence” (ibid.). The consistency and legal credibility of the verdict is further jeopardized by the fact that the judges deleted one of the basic elements of the indictment, namely the statement about the two accused having induced on 20 December 1988 into Malta airport the suitcase that was supposedly used to hide the bomb that exploded in the Pan Am jet.
12. Furthermore, the Opinion of the Court seems to be inconsistent in a basic respect: while the first accused was found “guilty”, the second accused was found “not guilty”. It is to be noted that the judgement, in the latter’s case, was not “not proven”, but “not guilty”. 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.
13. The Opinion of the Court is exclusively based on circumstantial evidence and on a series of highly problematic inferences. As to the undersigned’s knowledge, there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime. In such a context, the guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational. This impression is enforced when one considers that the actual wording of the larger part of the Opinion of the Court points more into the direction of a “not proven” verdict. The arbitrary aspect of the verdict is becoming even more obvious when one considers that the prosecution, at a rather late stage of the trial, decided to “split” the accusation and to change the very essence of the indictment by renouncing the identification of the second accused as a member of Libyan intelligence so as to actually disengage him from the formerly alleged collusion with the first accused in the supposed perpetration of the crime. Some light is shed on this procedure by the otherwise totally incomprehensible “not guilty” verdict in regard to the second accused.
14. This leads the undersigned to the suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case and thus may have adversely affected the outcome of the trial. This may have a profound impact on the evaluation of the professional reputation and integrity of the panel of three Scottish judges. Seen from the final outcome, a certain coordination of the strategies of the prosecution, of the defense, and of the judges’ considerations during the later period of the trial is not totally unlikely. This, however, — when actually proven — would have a devastating effect on the whole legal process of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands and on the legal quality of its findings.
15. In the above context, the undersigned has reached the general conclusion that the outcome of the trial may well have been determined by political considerations and may to a considerable extent have been the result of more or less openly exercised influence from the part of actors outside the judicial framework — facts which are not compatible with the basic principle of the division of powers and with the independence of the judiciary, and which put in jeopardy the very rule of law and the confidence citizens must have in the legitimacy of state power and the functioning of the state’s organs - whether on the traditional national level or in the framework of international justice as it is gradually being established through the United Nations Organization.
16. On the basis of the above observations and evaluation, the undersigned has — to his great dismay — reached the conclusion that the trial, seen in its entirety, was not fair and was not conducted in an objective manner. Indeed, there are many more questions and doubts at the end of the trial than there were at its beginning. The trial has effectively created more confusion than clarity and no rational observer can make any statement on the complex subject matter “beyond any reasonable doubt”. Irrespective of this regrettable outcome, the search for the truth must continue. This is the requirement of the rule of law and the right of the victims’ families and of the international public.
17. The international observer may draw one general conclusion from the conduct of the trial, which allows to formulate a general maxim applicable to judicial procedures in general: proper judicial procedure is simply impossible if political interests and intelligence services — from whichever side — succeed in interfering in the actual conduct of a court. We should remember the wisdom of Immanuel Kant who — in his treatise on eternal peace (Zum ewigen Frieden), elaborating on the essence of the rule of law — unambiguously stated that secrecy is never compatible with a republican system determined by the rule of law. The purpose of intelligence services — from whichever side — lies in secret action and deception, not in the search for truth. Justice and the rule of law can never be achieved without transparency.
18. Regrettably, through the conduct of the Court, disservice has been done to the important cause of international criminal justice. The goals of criminal justice on an international level cannot be advanced in a context of power politics and in the absence of an elaborate division of powers. What is true on the national level, applies to the transnational level as well. No national court can function if it has to act under pressure from the executive power and if vital evidence is being withheld from it because of political interests. The realities faced by the Scottish Court in the Netherlands have demonstrated this truth in a very clear and dramatic fashion — the political impact stemming, in this particular case, from a highly complex web of national and transnational interests related to the interaction among several major actors on the international scene.
19. The undersigned would like to express his humble opinion — or hope, for that matter — that an appeal, if granted, will correct the deficiencies of the trial as explained above. It goes without saying that all will depend on the integrity and independence of the five judges of an eventual Court of Appeal operating under Scottish law.
20. The above evaluation should in no way be interpreted as to diminish the idealistic contribution and commitment of so many civil servants of the Scottish Court Service and the Scottish police authorities who guaranteed the smooth functioning of the whole court operation at Kamp van Zeist under difficult and truly extraordinary circumstances.
The undersigned would like to emphasize that the above remarks constitute a personal evaluation by himself alone and that he is only bound by the dictates of his conscience; as an international citizen committed to the goals and principles of the United Nations Charter, he does not accept any pressure or influence from the part of any government, political party or interest group.
Truth in a matter of criminal justice has to be found through a transparent inquiry that will only be possible if all considerations of power politics are put aside. The rule of law is not compatible with the rules of power politics; justice cannot be done unless in complete independence, based on reason and the unequivocal commitment to basic human rights.
Dr. Hans Köchler
The man is incarcerated in Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, Scotland.
by Professor Hans Koechler, international observer of the International Progress Organization nominated by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the basis of Security Council resolution 1192 (1998)
Vienna, 26 March 2002/P/RE/17553
Following his observation of the proceedings of the Lockerbie trial during the period 5 May 2000-31 January 2001, the undersigned observed the appeal proceedings of the High Court of Justiciary at Kamp van Zeist in the Netherlands from 15 October 2001 to 14 March 2002. He attended the procedural hearing and the presentation by a relative of a victim of the Lockerbie bombing of the Petition to the Nobile Officium on 15 October 2001 and observed the appeal hearings from 23 January 2002 until the last session on 14 February 2002. He was present for the announcement of the appeal decision on 14 March 2002. He met regularly with the Registrar and the Deputy Registrar of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands and, on 7 February 2002, passed two lists of written questions to the Crown Office Lockerbie Criminal Case Team (Prosecutor Fiscals Office) and to the Registrar of the Scottish Court respectively. He received a written answer, dated 8 February 2002, from the Crown Office and several oral and written communications, in response to his inquiries, from the Registrar of the Scottish Court. He also met with the Governor of H. M. Prison Zeist. He interviewed the appellant and inspected the conditions of his detention at H. M. Prison Zeist on 24 January 2002. At the appellants request, he met with him again on 12 February 2002. After the announcement of the decision of the Appeal Court on 14 March 2002, the undersigned met a third time with the appellant in the company of other international observers present on that day. All meetings and contacts were arranged through the Scottish Court Service.
During the entire period of the appeal he made no public comments on the appeal case and did not seek a meeting with the judges of the Appeal Court, Lord Cullen, Lord Kirkwood, Lord Macfayden, Lord Nimmo Smith, and Lord Osborne. He exercised his observer mission on the basis of respect for the constitutional independence of the judiciary as outlined in his report on the Lockerbie trial of 3 February 2001, and interpreted his mission in the sense of an evaluation in regard to the requirements of due process and of the fairness of the trial, as outlined in his explanatory statement of 9 June 2001.
On the basis of his observation of the appeal hearings and of the meetings and inquiries mentioned above, the undersigned presents the following report on and evaluation of the appeal proceedings:
1. All administrative aspects of the appeal case were handled with great care, efficiency and professionalism by the staff of the Scottish Court Service. All requests made by the undersigned in the exercise of his observer mission were handled promptly and diligently by the Scottish Court Service as well as by the Governor of H. M. Prison Zeist.
2. The conditions of the detention of the appellant during the period of the appeal were humane and in full conformity with European and international legal standards. The undersigneds meetings with the appellant were arranged without delay and held under adequate conditions. To the knowledge of the undersigned, no meetings with any persons were imposed on the appellant against his will. Family visits were allowed and handled in an expeditious manner (as far as the prison authorities were concerned).
3. The report by the trial court In Note of Appeal by Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi, addressed to the appeal judges, dealing with the grounds of appeal lodged by the appellant and explaining the approach followed in the formulation of the Opinion of the Court, did not, in the undersigneds view, infringe upon the rights of the appellant in the appeal proceedings.
4. The Crown Office handled the information requests of the undersigned in a professional manner (although it avoided answering his questions in regard to the alleged withholding of evidence by the police authorities and the alleged invitations for holiday trips to Scotland extended by the Scottish police to one of the prosecutions key witnesses).
5. For unexplained reasons, the Defense refused to give any information whatsoever. It refused to provide the grounds of appeal (which were filed in the Note of Appeal dated 8 June 2001) even though the Scottish Court Service had approached the Defense on the undersigned's behalf to ascertain whether the Defense would accede to his request. The Defense also rejected another observers request for copies of the Defense's submissions at the appeal hearings. During the entire period of the appeal, there was a total lack of transparency in regard to the Defense's actions.
6. The two representatives of the US Department of Justice who were referred to in the undersigned's report on the trial of 3 February 2001, Par. 4, were present on the side of the prosecution team from the beginning of the appeal hearings on 23 January 2002. The Crown Office, in a written communication to the undersigned dated 8 February 2002, stated that it is a matter for the court itself to regulate who should be present, but explained that the High Court of Justiciary has for long accepted that it is a matter for the Lord Advocate and Crown Counsel whom they choose to have in court in their support. Because of the role they played during the trial (see Par. 5 of the undersigneds report), the continued presence of the two US representatives introduced into the appeal proceedings a political element that should have been avoided.
7. The same applies to the presence in the courtroom of the head of the Libyan defense team on the side of the Scottish defense team. The undersigned would like to note that the formers presence was not requested by the appellant. The undersigned was informed that the presence of foreign individuals supporting the prosecution and defense teams was due to an informal arrangement on the basis of mutuality between the US and Libya. This, however, gave the entire proceedings an aura of international politics that is not appropriate for an independent court.
8. The appeal proceedings were further overshadowed by at least two meetings between Libyan, US and UK intelligence-cum-political officials in the United Kingdom during the period of the appeal. According to reliable 3 media reports and official US statements, those meetings dealt with the issue of Libyas acceptance of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and with her obligation for compensation at a time when the matter was still sub judice in an independent court. In the highly politicized context of the Lockerbie case, these meetings may have been prejudicial to the outcome of the appeal. The urgent press release issued by the appellants Libyan defense lawyer on 28 January 2002 was factually wrong in its reference to alleged UN demands that Libya pays [sic] compensation for the bombing and did nothing to dispel the suspicions.
9. One of the most serious shortcomings of the appeal proceedings (as of the trial proceedings) was that the appellant did not have adequate defense a circumstance that weighs heavily in an adversarial judicial system where the fairness of the trial depends mainly on the equality of arms between prosecution and defense. Because of this situation, the requirements of Art. 6 (Right to a fair trial) of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms were not met.
10. The lack of adequate representation of the appellant became evident in the handling of the defense case during the appeal in several respects: (a) In spite of the often vague and entirely circumstantial evidence, the Defense, in its Note of Appeal as well as during the appeal hearings, did not make the point that there was insufficient evidence in law to convict the appellant; (b) in the course of the appeal hearings, the Defense Counsel expressly disavowed any reliance on Para. b of Section 106 (3) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 which states that an appellant may bring under review any miscarriage of justice, which may include such miscarriage based on the jurys having returned a verdict which no reasonable jury, properly directed, could have returned; (c) the Defense did not raise any of the technical issues, particularly in regard to the timer used in the explosive device, on which new information had become available since the Verdict on 31 January 2001; (d) the Defense further did not raise the issue of Mr. Anthony Gauci, key witness of the Prosecution, having been invited repeatedly for holiday trips to Scotland by the Scottish police. This information was available before the beginning of the appeal hearings; it calls into question the trustworthiness and reliability of the prosecution witness, on whose testimony the verdict substantially depended; (e) the Defense did not raise the issue of why important evidence about the breaking of a lock at the luggage storage area at Heathrow airport had disappeared from the police records and why it was not made available to the trial court; instead, the Defense Counsel stated at the beginning of the appeal hearings that there was no fault on the part of the Prosecution in regard to the non-availability of this important evidence. It is hard to understand why, in an adversarial system, the Defense should come to the defense of the Prosecution on such a crucial matter which could cast doubt over the entire strategy of the prosecution; (f) there was an obvious antagonism between the Defense Team and the defense support team represented in the courtroom by the Libyan defense lawyer, a situation which seriously hampered the efficiency of the defense strategy; (g) as an apparent consequence of this antagonism and of a lack of co-ordination on the part of the defense, additional material in support of the defense case was collected only after the appeal hearings had started, i.e. at a time when 4 it was much too late to include any additional information in the grounds of appeal; (h) as a result of this, a chaotic situation ensued which also was referred to in the British media; bills of members of the defense support team were not paid, which created the impression of a defense operation in disarray. All of this was detrimental to the rights of the appellant under the European Human Rights Convention.
11. In its Note of Appeal and presentations during the hearings, the Defense failed to raise the issue of substantial evidence having been withheld during the trial and the judges apparent satisfaction with this situation (see Para. 7 of the undersigneds report on the trial). However, according to a Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, even in an adversarial system of criminal law the trial judges have the obligation to scrutinize the withheld information; failure to do so on the part of the trial judge will result in the unfairness of the trial (Case of Rowe and Davis v. the United Kingdom, Application no. 28901/95, Strasbourg, 16 February 2000, Para. 65 of the Judgment). Furthermore, the following statement in Para. 60 of the Courts Judgment is also applicable to a criminal trial under Scottish law: Article 6 1 [European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms] requires, as indeed does English law , that the prosecution authorities should disclose to the defence all material evidence in their possession for or against the accused . The Defense in the present appeal completely failed to raise this basic issue and thus gave up one of the main legal instruments at its disposal.
12. The Defense further failed to raise the issue of the fairness of the trial in regard to the basic requirements of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms a fact which may seriously compromise the appellants ability to eventually claim his rights at the Privy Council and/or at the European Court of Human Rights. Indeed, because of its actions during the trial the Defense itself may be seen as part of the problem, complicit in the lack of fairness of the proceedings this may explain why this basic issue was not raised in the course of the appeal proceedings.
13. The defense strategy was further seriously undermined by the rather bizarre circumstances of the testimony given by the Defense's key additional witness, Mr. Manly. While being adamant about the technical details about how the padlock at Heathrow airport was broken (cut like butter), he was highly confused and proven totally wrong in regard to the exact location of the door and the way in which the padlock was attached to the door. At the beginning of his testimony he told the court that, because of an accident, he was under medication and that he was afraid he might have to vomit in the course of his testimony. He looked very frail and behaved in a highly emotional, at times even aggressive manner. For the undersigned it was impossible to obtain any specific information about the factors which led to this deplorable state of health. In spite of the efforts promised by the Scottish Court Service, it was not possible to obtain any information on the kind of medication under the influence of which Mr. Manly may have acted in the way he did, or on the time and nature of the accident that made this medication necessary. In fact, Mr. Manlys testimony seen in its entirety may even have been counterproductive in regard to the defense strategy. 5 The question remains why the Defense introduced Mr. Manly as an additional witness under these particular circumstances.
14. A problematic aspect of the appeal proceedings consisted in the fact that the judges were satisfied to analyze the verdict of the trial court in a merely formal manner, not dealing with the substance of the argument nor with its plausibility and logical consistency. In the Opinion of the Appeal Court they repeatedly expressed the view stated in Para. 25 that once evidence has been accepted by the trial court, it is for that court to determine what inference or inferences should be drawn from that evidence. If this is the attitude of an appeal court in the Scottish system of criminal law, then the question arises how a meaningful role of an appeal court can be defined at all.
15. One of the basic weaknesses of the decision of the Appeal Court consisted in its very refusal to properly evaluate, i.e. reevaluate, the plausibility of the inferences drawn from Mr. Gaucis testimony and from the information about weather conditions in Malta at the time in question. In the course of the renewed presentation of the respective evidence during the appeal proceedings it became entirely clear to any rational observer that the report on weather conditions in Malta had been interpreted arbitrarily by the trial judges and that the weather conditions described by Mr. Gauci were much more compatible with the weather report of the meteorological service for 23 November 1988 than with that for 7 December. To the undersigned it is obvious that the evidence was weighted in a deliberate manner so as to be compatible with the date of the appellants stay in Malta. The judges as well as the appeal judges arbitrarily excluded consideration of the fact that 7 December was a day before a high Roman-Catholic holiday (which has particular importance in a Catholic country such as Malta) and that the witness would have remembered the fact that a Libyan had bought clothes on the evening before such a holiday (on which the shop was closed). Put in the context of the evidence available and the circumstances in Malta at the respective period of time, the probability of 23 November 1988 as the date of the purchase of the clothes is much higher than that of 7 December 1988, when the appellant was in Malta.
16. Because in this entirely circumstantial case, in the absence of any material evidence, everything finally depends on whether the appellant bought the clothes or not, the entire verdict collapses if this fact cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. If the evidence presented during the trial and the additional evidence made available during the appeal is analyzed in its entirety, it becomes clear to any rational observer that the theory of ingestion of the luggage containing the explosive device in Malta needs considerably more assumptions and is based on much lower probability than the theory of ingestion at Heathrow. In an entirely circumstantial case like the present one, this means that a determination beyond a reasonable doubt cannot honestly be made if one bases ones argumentation and inferences upon reason and common sense. The trial verdict, confirmed by the appeal judges, would not stand a plausibility test in a scientific context defined by the rules of logic and reason.
17. Furthermore, the unanimous decision by the Appeal Court is incomprehensible if one takes into consideration the often highly critical, very precise and inquisitive questions and comments by some of the appeal 6 judges in the course of the appeal hearings. On day 96 (7 February 2002) Lord Osborne, in a debate with the Prosecution on the question of the insertion of the luggage containing the explosive device at Luqa airport in Malta, said: But is it not a different matter to say, on the basis of these features of the situation, that the bomb passed through Luqa Airport, standing that there is considerable and quite convincing evidence that that could not have happened. He further stated: Now, its quite difficult rationally to follow how the Court take the step of saying, Well, we dont know how it got onto the flight. We cant say that. But it must have been there. On the face of it, it may not be a rational conclusion. And in response to a remark of the Prosecution, he went on: Well, all sorts of irrational conclusions may have a basis in fact, but the problem is that they dont logically relate to the facts.
18. It is impossible to understand why Lord Osborne finally was able to consent to the rejection of all grounds of appeal and why he did not follow the line of rational scrutiny of the trial judges reasoning. The unanimity of the decision of the Appeal Court is not plausible at all if one looks carefully at arguments such as those put forward by Lord Osborne in the course of the appeal hearings. What caused the appeal judges to make this rather drastic sacrificium intellectus of ignoring reason and common sense by rejecting each and every ground of appeal unanimously?
19. The Appeal Court furthermore failed to deal adequately with the substantial new evidence that was presented in the course of the appeal. In view of the many inferences and of the arbitrary, often contradictory argumentation of the trial court, the additional evidence would have had special significance for an honest reevaluation of the trial courts argument. For unexplained reasons, the Appeal Court refused to deal with any other theory than that advanced by the Prosecution which is all the more incomprehensible if one considers the evidence originally presented at the trial concerning the possibility of a bag (a brown Samsonite suitcase) having been ingested at Heathrow.
20. In the course of the hearings it became quite clear that the judges were not at ease with this situation in which they had to review a verdict that was not sound by the basic standards of logic and common sense, and that they may have tried to seek a way out of their dilemma (having either to confirm or cancel the verdict under conditions of merely circumstantial and partially withheld evidence) by ordering a retrial: one of the possibilities that is available to an appeal court under Scottish law. Lord Cullen repeatedly raised the issue during the hearings and addressed the question of the possibility of a retrial under the High Court of Justiciary (Proceedings in the Netherlands) (United Nations) Order 1998 vis--vis the Prosecution and Defense, asking for their comments. This possibility, however, did not exist as a real option because the Order in Council promulgated to facilitate the conducting of criminal proceedings under Scots law in the Netherlands on the basis of section 1 of the United Nations Act 1946(a) (United Kingdom) did only deal with the eventuality of appeals, not with that of a retrial. This again has negatively impacted on the rights of the appellant under the European Human Rights Convention.
21. If one takes into consideration that the trial verdict was inconsistent, even irrational, in the basic respect of having found one accused guilty and the 7 co-accused not guilty while the accusation was based on the joint action and co-ordination of the action among the two accused in Malta (see Art. 12 of the undersigneds report on the trial) , it is obvious that Para. (b) of Section 106 (3) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 was applicable for the filing of grounds of appeal. It is incomprehensible why the Defense did not make use of this provision and was satisfied to list rather weak grounds of appeal related to a misdirection of the trial judges concerning the interpretation of specific pieces of evidence and the references drawn from them. This made possible the rather evasive strategy of the appeal judges expressed in an exemplary manner in Par. 369 of the Opinion of the Appeal Court: We have not had to consider whether the verdict of guilty was one which no reasonable trial court, properly directing itself, could have returned in the light of that evidence.
22. From the circumstances of the appeal described above (as well as from the circumstances of the trial itself described and analyzed in the undersigned’s report of 3 February 2001) it is evident that the appellant did not get a fair trial according to the requirements of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Article 6 (1) of the Convention stipulates: In the determination of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law . Art. 6 (3) Para. (c) states that everyone charged with a criminal offence has the right to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing . As explained above, the trial court as well as the appeal court acted in a highly politicized context in which the judges freedom of deliberation was actually, though not legally (except for the one issue of the Order in Council mentioned in Para. 20 above), limited and a politically expedient decision may have been called for so as not to embarrass the governments that set up the framework for the extraterritorial court in the Netherlands in the form of the Agreement of which the Security Council was notified in a joint letter dated 24 August 1998 by the Permanent Representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States.
23. The Agreement, having regard to Security Council resolution 1192 (1998), provided for the setting up of a Scottish trial in the Netherlands. This extraterritorial arrangement (based on a consensus reached among the concerned United Nations member states so as to solve the dispute over the Lockerbie issue) was meant to detach the conduct of the court proceedings from eventual public and/or political pressure in Scotland. That was the rationale behind the extraterritorial arrangement. In the spirit of this agreement, the judges should have held their deliberations on the premises of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands. However, for the consideration of their decision during the rather long period from 8 February to 13 March 2002, they retreated to Scotland, which in the undersigneds view counteracted the intentions expressed in the setup of the Court in the Netherlands. If there was any reason or justification for this highly complex and costly arrangement, then it consisted in conducting the entire operation of the court away from the direct political and/or public-opinion influence that may have been present in a country where there was likely to exist a highly charged political climate in regard to that particular criminal case. 8
24. In addition to that, the appellant was deprived of his right to adequate legal representation (in the many respects described above in regard to the conduct of the appeal proceedings on the part of the defense team). Furthermore, he did not have the possibility of choosing the defense team on his own. The team was chosen for him by the former Libyan defense lawyer, Mr. Maghour, who at the same time was acting as Libyas representative in the cases Libyan Arab Jamahiriya v. United Kingdom and Libyan Arab Jamahiriya v. United States respectively at the International Court of Justice. The official role of the Libyan defense lawyer as agent of the Libyan state was incompatible with his duty to give adequate legal assistance to his client in a case of personal criminal responsibility such as the one before the Scottish Court in the Netherlands. In view of the Defenses decision not to make use of many of the means available to it for the adequate defense of the appellant, the original choice of the defense team (made without the participation of the appellant) may have negatively impacted on the rights of the appellant. That the defense team was out of tune with the appellant whom it was supposed to represent became clear in the rather strange fact that the Defense refused to meet with the undersigned or to answer any of his questions, while the appellant, through the prison administration and the Scottish Court Service, asked for a meeting with the undersigned.
25. In the meeting of 12 February 2002, requested by the appellant, he disclosed to the undersigned that he was made aware of only 3 out of 16 joint minutes agreed upon by the Prosecution and the Defense in the course of the trial. He also stated that his instructions were not always followed by the Defense (as for instance in the case of the x-ray machine which the appellant had asked to have brought into the courtroom for inspection) and that he did not give instructions to the Defense to drop the special defense during the trial (see Para. 9 of the undersigneds report of 3 February 2001); he further said that he did not understand why no submission of no case to answer was made in his case by the Defense (while they made such a step in regard to the co-accused), etc. All of these details underline the basic fact that the appellant did not get adequate legal representation and suggest that the defense strategy may not have been genuine and authentic (as required under European standards). The suspicions raised by the undersigned in his trial report were confirmed by the information obtained during the aforementioned meeting with the appellant.
26. In this context of evaluating the fairness of the trial proceedings, it is essential to take note of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in regard to the requirement of fairness in an adversarial system of criminal law. In the Judgment of 16 February 2000, Para. 60 (Case of Rowe and Davis v. the United Kingdom, Application no. 28901/95), the Court explicitly states the principles to be applied also in the present case, particularly in regard to the Defenses decision not to use many of the legal options available to it to present the case of the accused / appellant: It is a fundamental aspect of the right to a fair trial that criminal proceedings, including the elements of such proceedings which relate to procedure, should be adversarial and that there should be equality of arms between the prosecution and defence.
On the basis of the above observations and evaluation it can be stated that the appeal proceedings were not fair (and thus not in conformity with the requirements of Art. 6 Para. 1 of the European Human Rights Convention) in two basic respects:
(a) The appeal judges chose a kind of evasive strategy by not scrutinizing the argumentation of the trial court in regard to its plausibility and logical consistency, thus not questioning at all the arbitrariness of the evaluation of evidence by the trial judges, and not paying adequate attention to new evidence presented in the course of the appeal an attitude of effective denial of responsibility that made the entire process a highly formal, artificial and abstract undertaking not related to the search for truth (an essential requirement of justice) and rendered the appeal proceedings virtually meaningless. What else could be the meaning of an appeal process if not a comprehensive review of a trial courts decision in regard to its duty to find the truth in order to make a decision on guilt or innocence beyond a reasonable doubt?
(b) The Defense chose not to make use of many of the means available to it to defend the appellant and thus deprived him of his right to adequate and authentic legal representation under European standards.
One may formulate as a general maxim that in a case like the present one where the proceedings are based entirely on circumstantial evidence and the Opinion of the Court operates with a series of inferences (often being as vague as mere speculation) that assumption (or conclusion) is preferable to any other that requires fewer inferences and less artificial (or arbitrary) reinterpretation of the facts (the evidence accepted by the court). If one takes this maxim of logical reasoning and common sense into consideration, one may safely state that a reasonable jury could never have come to the conclusion of guilt in regard to the appellant on the basis of the vague and ambivalent evidence related to the supposed sequence of events in Malta. Furthermore, it can be reasonably stated that a determination of guilty under such circumstances does in no way meet the basic requirement under Scottish law that proof must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. The Appeal Court completely failed to deal with this basic issue of the case and preferred to effectively put the blame on the Defenses omissions explicitly stating that the Defense had accepted that there was a sufficiency of evidence and that it had expressly disavowed any claim of a miscarriage of justice according to the terms of Section 106 (3) Para. (b) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 (referring to a jurys having returned a verdict which no reasonable jury, properly directed, could have returned).
Whatever the nature of a system of criminal law, whether inquisitive or adversarial, criminal proceedings, in order to be fair, must be based on the search for truth by means of establishing the facts and applying logical argumentation in the interpretation of the facts.
In view of the above conclusions, the undersigned considers it of special importance that investigations will be undertaken by the competent judicial authorities of the United Kingdom and Scotland respectively (a) in regard to the alleged withholding of evidence on the break-in at Heathrow airport, and (b) in regard to the alleged invitations by the Scottish Police of Mr. Gauci for holiday trips to Scotland (which may have constituted illegal influencing of a key witness of the Prosecution by the Police eventually making necessary a reevaluation of the evidence given by this witness). Furthermore, it will be of utmost importance to investigate the absence of the police after the break-in at Heathrow. In his testimony before the Appeal Court, Mr. Manly stated that he did not see a single police officer after the reporting of the incident on the night of 20/21 December 1988. These are just three of several mysterious circumstances that have led international observers of the Lockerbie 10 proceedings to raise reasonable doubts in regard to the correct and independent handling of the case by the judicial authorities of the United Kingdom and Scotland. In this regard, the call of British victims families for a public inquiry in the House of Commons gains special relevance.
If the shortcomings and deficiencies of the trial and appeal proceedings referred to above are not to be attributed merely to this special court (having operated under considerable political influence), but to the system of criminal justice in Scotland in general, a comprehensive review of that system may be necessary. Because of the exemplary nature of the case in regard to the handling of a criminal case in a highly politicized international context , and in view of repeated references by the Scottish judicial authorities to the adversarial nature of the Scottish system of criminal law (which was emphasized to explain the actual conduct of the Lockerbie trial), it may be of importance to ask four basic questions related to the compatibility of Scottish criminal law with the requirements of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms:
(A) Is the Scottish system of criminal law insofar as it excludes, in appeal proceedings, the critical review of the trial courts evaluation of evidence compatible with Art. 6 of the Convention? If the argumentation of a trial court cannot be scrutinized and its original evaluation of evidence becomes a dogma not to be challenged by an appeal court, an appellant is effectively deprived of his right to a comprehensive review of his case in regard to the basic principle of fairness. The Appeal Courts statement in Para. 21 of the Opinion issued on 14 March 2002 that it was not open to this court to review all the evidence which was before the trial court in order to determine for itself whether that court had come to the correct conclusion highlights this problem; this finally leads to the question whether an appeal is not rendered meaningless under the restrictions imposed on it in the interpretation of the present Appeal Court under Scottish law. What is the meaning of an appeal in such a context of criminal law, where the original evaluation of evidence by the trial judges cannot be scrutinized by the appeal judges? A critical review of proceedings, which constitutes the essence of the rule of law, including the system of criminal law, becomes impossible in such a context. Arbitrariness takes the place of comprehensive reexamination of a case.
(B) If the defense does not properly play its antagonistic role in an adversarial system, i.e. if it chooses not to use the means actually available to it and does not act in an authentic manner, the interplay of forces in regard to the equality of arms which is absolutely essential in an adversarial system of criminal law is set off balance. Because the role of the judges is not that of active investigators, there will be no remedy for such behavior by the Defense, i.e. for its decision to neglect its duties, and the accused / appellant will be deprived of his right to a fair trial.
(C) The rejection of any inquisitive duty on the part of the judges in an adversarial system such as the Scottish one may not be compatible with Art. 6 (1) of the European Human Rights Convention. (See the European Court of Human Rights Judgment of 16 February 11 2000, referred to above, declaring, inter alia, in regard to adversarial proceedings, the unfairness caused at the trial by the absence of any scrutiny of the withheld information by the trial judge.)
(D) If we follow the operative definition of the formulation proven beyond a reasonable doubt in the context of the appeal courts and the trial courts deliberations and in the opinions of the trial and appeal courts, the concept of reasonable doubt becomes not only imprecise but meaningless because it is applied to an argumentative situation in which the determination of guilt is based on often vague evidence and on a series of highly problematic inferences. If a court is satisfied that the kind of weak evidence and inferences drawn from it found in the present criminal proceedings fit together to form a real and convincing pattern (see Para. 368 of the Opinion of the Appeal Court of 14 March 2002), then any kind of inference and speculation, as long as it is drawn by a court in the exercise of its official function, meets the criterion of proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This would imply that an accused / appellant would have no chance to escape the arbitrariness of a courts reasoning because virtually every set of inferences irrespective of the grade of probability and of the rational quality of the argument would fall under this definition. Such a situation, undoubtedly, cannot be reconciled with the basic requirements of the fairness of trial proceedings.
The Lockerbie case is also of exemplary nature for the development of international criminal justice. Because a precedent may have been set by the handling of the case in the framework of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands, the undersigned considered it necessary to add to the mere observations on the proceedings the above analytical remarks on the set-up, general normative framework and specific functioning of the court under the conditions of an adversarial system of criminal justice.
Regrettably, the undersigned has come to the conclusion that this specific type of court and court proceedings whereby a national court deals with a matter of personal criminal responsibility of a foreigner in a case which at the same time relates to a dispute between UN member states, and specifically between the accuseds state and the state that exercises jurisdiction over him is not viable in regard to the attainment of justice in the sense of transparent procedures and independent deliberations of a criminal court. The aforementioned dispute between states (in particular the United States, the United Kingdom and Libya) is still pending before the International Court of Justice and the trial arrangements have been set up following a resolution of the Security Council based on Chapter VII of the Charter. It has been proven as impossible in this highly charged political context of inter-state relations and higher state interests to conduct a criminal trial in an independent legal space, i.e. in an atmosphere of independence vis--vis national politics and international power politics at the same time. The extraterritoriality of the location of the proceedings was simply not sufficient to guarantee a fully independent trial. The geographical location of the proceedings outside of Scotland, despite the enormous costs involved, finally proved to be only a kind of sedativum for those concerned about the independence and impartiality of the proceedings.
In this regard, the undersigned would like to recall the reservations expressed by the International Progress Organizations Committee of Legal Experts on UN Sanctions against 12 Libya, in a declaration dated 3 September 1998, concerning Security Council resolution 1192 (1998): The Scottish legal system is undoubtedly up to international standards of due process and fair trial. There is no reason to doubt the report (Doc. S/1997/991) of the independent experts appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on the Scottish judicial system. The real issue is not whether Scottish law is applied or not, but whether a tribunal exclusively consisting of Scottish judges can meet the requirement of impartiality. The two Libyan suspects have already been publicly convicted in the United States and in the UK in violation of basic requirements of due process of law and the presumption of innocence. Under the present circumstances, it is hard to see how Scottish judges should be completely independent of this public conviction. Only an international composition of the tribunal could provide remedy to this serious problem of fairness and impartiality. The I.P.O. Committee further stated that a criminal tribunal on this case should either be international in its composition or should operate in an international framework such as that of the International Court of Justice. The procedural details should be worked out on the basis of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and not through bilateral agreements between the governments of the UK and the Netherlands as stipulated in Art. 3 of the Security Council resolution. The undersigned regrets to admit that, contrary to his hopes at the beginning of the trial in May 2000, the above-expressed reservations in the formulation of which he had participated as co-ordinator of the Committee of Legal Experts were proven justified in the course of events.
Because of the circumstances of the trial and appeal proceedings described above and in view of the considerable influence of power politics on any case where a national court deals with a matter related to a dispute between states, including the one exercising jurisdiction, the undersigned is convinced that the only viable alternative in terms of independence of the judiciary and fairness of trial in any such case will be proceedings under the regulations of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He expresses the hope that the Statute will come into force in the foreseeable future in spite of its rejection by United Nations member states involved in the Lockerbie dispute. It has become evident that no national court and no ad hoc tribunal set up by the Security Council can meet the requirements of independence, due process, impartiality and fairness. Only an internationally composed court (such as the ICC) will be able, at least in regard to its basic setup and procedural rules, to operate outside the framework of power politics.
Regrettably, the decision of the Appeal Court in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi v. H. M. Advocate was not a victory for justice, but for power politics. The proceedings have proven that a legally guaranteed separation of powers in a system which prides itself on its commitment to the rule of law is not a sufficient safeguard against political interference so as to ensure the independence and impartiality of criminal proceedings. However, the Lockerbie proceedings have taken place in the common European space of human rights and may accordingly after all means of review in the judicial context of the United Kingdom have been exhausted be reviewed by the European Court of Human Rights that exercises its jurisdiction on the basis of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Dr. Hans Koechler
The man is incarcerated in Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, Scotland.
Susan Lindauer is a remarkable woman, not only having been in the CIA but an active agent trying to secure deals with Iraq and Libya.
She was honest enough not to let these deals become causes for war, which is what the high priests at the CIA wanted.
She suffered terrible psychological torture with mind-disordering drugs to make sure that her testimonies, if they ever came to court, would not be credible.
Luckily her Uncle was well-connected enough to get her out of Carswell Prison and allowed her to publish "Extreme Prejudice". I bought her book to check facts for my booklet "9-11 – the Israeli Links". And her story is credible and should be widely known, as you are helping to bring about.
I would therefore believe her account of the Lockerbie bomb trail. It sounds a bit extreme out of the blue, but taken with other stories about the CIA's involvement in callous executions and torture of leakers, it is also credible.
The Israeli links are also likely, given the stories about their black ops recounted by Victor Ostrovsky in "By Way of Deception".
On this evidence, I stand down my theory about a heat-seeking missile from defences over Chapel Cross, but it is difficult to dismiss altogether.
"The Trail of the Octopus" is the book I meant to refer to.
Lester Knox Coleman is the first American citizen since the Vietnam War to seek political asylum in another country. Hounded by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Middle East heroin traffickers, Coleman is a victim of the biggest international cover-up in modern times. In the spring of 1988, Coleman was on a mission for the world's most secretive and well-funded espionage agency - the Defence Intelligence Agency. Coleman had been ordered to spy on the DEA in Cyprus which, along with the CIA, was running a series of "controlled deliveries" of Lebanese heroin through the airports of Frankfurt and London en route to America. Coleman discovered that security of this "sting" operation had been breached and warned the American Embassy that a disaster was waiting to happen. It was ignored. Seven months later, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie. Among the dead was a DEA courier. Over the last four years Washington has ensured that the blame for the bombing rests with Libyan terrorists and negligent Pan Am officials. With Pan Am and their insurers fighting this version all the way, it was never likely that Coleman's experiences in Cyprus would go unnoticed. In 1991 America's state security apparatus - the octopus - made its move. Donald Goddard is the author of "Joey", "The Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer", "All Fall Down", "Undercover" and "The Insider".
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trail-Octopus-Beirut-Lockerbie-Inside/dp/0747 51562X
Thirty years ago I saw Lockerbie on fire – but I have yet to see justice done
21 hours ago The Independent
Prime suspect: Megrahi being escorted by security officers in Tripoli
Prime suspect: Megrahi being escorted by security officers in Tripoli ( AFP/Getty )
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi 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.
This was in Tripoli in the winter of 2011, in the turmoil of Libya’s civil war and the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. It was a time of great violence, a dozen bodies were piled up beside a roundabout a half mile from where I had seen Megrahi lie slowly dying. They were corpses of black men lynched by the rebels because they were supposedly mercenaries fighting for the regime: though in reality, they were victims of xenophobia against African migrants which had accompanied the uprising.
Megrahi himself had been convicted of a dreadful massacre; of being responsible for 270 deaths on 21 December 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland. A bomb – 12 ounces of Semtex in a Toshiba radio-cassette player – had been secreted in the luggage of the plane carrying passengers to the US, many returning home for Christmas.
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Wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 near Lockerbie (Getty)
After spending eight years in Scottish prisons following his conviction, Megrahi had been returned to Libya on compassionate grounds following a diagnosis of prostate cancer. After a few months in prison in Tripoli, unable to walk and bedridden, he was allowed to return to his family home.
There was vengeful anger expressed by some in Britain, and more so in the US, at Megrahi’s return to Libya. He had faked his illness, it was claimed, and even if that was not the case, he had escaped justice by not actually dying in a cell. The charge of subterfuge was reinforced by the perception that his release was part of the many dodgy deals between Tony Blair’s government and Colonel Gaddafi’s regime.
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We failed to learn from Lockerbie, and repeat our mistakes at peril
Yet there are good reasons to believe that the conviction of Megrahi was a shameful miscarriage of justice and that, as a result, the real perpetrators of one of the worst acts of terrorism in recent history remained free. That certainly was the view of many, including international jurists, intelligence officers, journalists who followed the case, and members of bereaved families. Among the latter group was Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing.
Dr Swire, a man of integrity and compassion, who became a spokesman for “UK Families 103” stressed that “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.”
Megrahi died in May 2012, a few months after I had seen him. Yet a campaign Dr Swire had helped set up, “Justice for Megrahi”, continues to help the Libyan’s family to seek a new appeal against the sentence in their efforts to posthumously clear his name.
The homecoming: Lockerbie bomber arrives in Tripoli
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Certainly, the chronology of the original investigation into the bombing is strange, raising serious questions about the official narrative.
Soon after the downing of the Pan Am flight, American and British security officials began laying the blame on an Iran-Syria axis. The suggested 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 PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command) which specialised in such operations.
HUNDREDS DIE AS JUMBO JET PLUNGES INTO TOWN
How The Independent first reported the news
Hundreds of people died last night when a Pan American jumbo jet carrying more than 250 people on a flight from London to New York broke up in mid-air and plunged on to the small Scottish town of Lockerbie.
The cause of the crash was not known last night, but a Pan Am spokesman, Jeff Kriendler, said “an incident” had occurred while the aircraft was flying at an altitude of 31,000 ft, but he refused to elaborate or speculate on the possible cause of the disaster. Since the craft was carrying a large number of US servicemen there was speculation that it could have been a terrorist bomb.
Early this morning, John Boyd, the Chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway, said that all 273 people on board were presumed dead. The number of ground casualties was still being assessed.
“The wreckage is spread over a very wide area – probably about 10 miles in radius. Parts of the wreckage have fallen on two residential areas in the town, causing considerable damage and setting fire to a number of houses.”
The town, 10 miles south-west of Dumfries, was devastated by a fireball 300 feet high as people ran from their homes in terror. The explosion blew a crater 20 feet deep and 100 feet long near the centre of the town, destroying many houses and killed a large number of townspeople. Early today, the whole of the southern side of the town was still on fire.
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 a Libyan intelligence officer, was finally extradited in 1999 – along with another man named as a suspect over the bombing, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, also allegedly employed by Libyan intelligence. The move came at a time when Colonel Gaddafi was in the process of getting back from into the international fold with the help of the British government.
I covered their trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, which took place in a specially constituted court, with a panel of Scottish judges, but without a jury, under Scots law. The two men were effectively charged with joint enterprise, conspiracy. Yet only Megrahi was found guilty. Fhimah had a cast iron alibi which the judges could not ignore. 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 was 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 – famously described the witness, Tony Gauci, as “an apple short of a picnic” and “not quite the full shilling”.
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.
The observer for the UN at the trial severely criticised the verdict as did many lawyers. 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.
Lockerbie: If not Megrahi, then who?
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Behind the controversy, accusations and recriminations over who carried out the attack lay the human tragedy of Lockerbie, a scene which is difficult to forget, even after three decades, for many of us who went there.
The memories which remain are of roads covered by slates blown off roofs, homes burnt out, a huge section of fuselage lying on top of a flattened row of houses.
DEVASTATION AS AIRLINER WITH MORE THAN 270 ON BOARD BREAKS APART IN MID-AIR
How The Independent first reported the news, cont.
Parts of the aircraft landed up to 18 miles away from the town. Last night the fire brigade said that 16 bodies, including some of the crew, had been recovered from the front section of the plane, found four miles to the east of Lockerbie in a heavily wooded area. One of the rescue helicopter crews spotted the section. Another helicopter discovered two bodies, one of which was a child, at least two miles away.
First reports said that six or seven townspeople had died, but the final death toll is expected to rise. The main portion of the aircraft narrowly avoided a petrol station, but hit a number of houses and a flyover in the town itself. Vehicles on the A74 Glasgow to Carlisle road, which runs through the town were hit and exploded into flames. Some drivers are reported to have died.
Last night, the massive rescue operation involved all the emergency services. RAF and Army rescue teams and helicopters all working in what were described as horrendous conditions made worse by bad weather.
By midnight, a list of 50 townspeople whose homes were damaged but who survived unhurt was pinned to the outside of the Town Hall, used as an emergency mortuary. Bodies were taken to the mortuary by soldiers.
And bodies. Bodies which had fallen out of the sky, on farmland around the village, on a golf course, but also on buildings and peoples hedges, gardens and driveways, among scattered luggage and plane seats.
Eleven people on the ground had been killed too – very sad losses, though it seemed astonishing that the number wasn’t higher considering the scale of what had taken place.
There was overwhelming shock and grief among the residents as well as those who were arriving by the hour, the emergency services, the media and volunteers who came to help from surrounding areas. People gathered at pubs, one of them the St Mungo Arms I recall, to speak quietly about those missing and about what they had experienced themselves.
The search for bodies ended six weeks later. All of the 243 passengers and 16 crew members on Flight 103 were dead, inevitably. They came from 21 countries: 190 were American and 43 were British citizens. The families of some of the foreign victims went to Lockerbie in the following weeks and months; the people of the town opened their doors to them.
A little later we heard the cold statistical analysis of the disaster. The cockpit and the forward section of the Boeing 747, and those on board had plunged 31,000 feet to the ground, those parts of the aircraft falling on a field near Tudergarth Church, outside Lockerbie. The rest of the plane had gone into a steep dive from 31,000 feet to 19,000 feet before breaking up over the town – the two wings and the fuel tanks landing on a road, Sherwood Crescent. Around 1,500 tonnes of material was blown into the air, a crater of 145 feet gouged out of the ground.
The 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing this week will be marked by a “walk of peace” with people asked to gather at Burnswalk, an ancient landmark near the town; and there will be a special remembrance service at Tundergarth Church.
The Very Reverend Dr Alan McDonald, a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, who will lead the service, said: “The people who have been organising the service, and the walk the next day, wanted something that would focus on hope and the future. We will seek hope and peace for all on these days”.
Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, lays a wreath at Dryfesdale Cemetery, near Lockerbie in 2013
Dr Jan Hogarth, one of the organisers, added: “We hope to help shift people’s perspective from an area associated with tragedy to a special spiritual landscape with a courageous community who held this tragedy with love, compassion, and kindness.
“Thirty years on, you would hope humanity would work towards achieving peace. We don’t have time to look backward, we must work together to achieve this ambition.”
Father Patrick Keegans had just been appointed as parish priest in Lockerbie and was looking forward to his first Christmas there at the time of the crash. His tireless work with the traumatised community drew wide praise and is remembered with gratitude.
He reflected: “For those of us who experienced Lockerbie, the story will never come to an end. Lockerbie lives with us, we are part of Lockerbie and Lockerbie is part of us: the horror, the tragedy, the sadness, the grief, the support and the love that was shown – all of that stays with us.”
Father Keegans, who is now retired, joined the “Justice for Megrahi” campaign after meeting the convicted man’s family and is now backing the call for a fresh appeal.
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“I can’t live with myself being silent,” he explained, “when I’m truly convinced that this man has been unjustly convicted; Lockerbie is an unfinished story as far as the legal aspects are concerned.”
Megrahi died at his home in Tripoli still protesting his innocence. He thanked Dr Jim Swire and others who had believed in him.
In his final days, he said: “I pray for all those who died every day.
“I shall be meeting my God soon, but the truth will come out, I really hope the truth of what really happened will come out one day.” _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The CIA, Drugs and Blowing Up Pan Am 103
The Lip TV
10,234 views
Published on 16 Apr 2014
Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the airline hired former Mossad agent Juval Aviv--who shares his findings in this Buzzsaw interview clip. What he discovered was an elaborate conspiracy by the C.I.A. involving drug trafficking, dirty state secrets, and a corrupt smear campaign against the media. Prepare to go down the rabbit hole in this short clip of the full talk with Sean Stone.
Watch the full Buzzsaw video here:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fs7mcSYCWWM
The CIA, Drugs and Blowing Up Pan Am 103 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7GJZkFLx5tA _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi 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.
This was in Tripoli in the winter of 2011, in the turmoil of Libya’s civil war and the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. It was a time of great violence, a dozen bodies were piled up beside a roundabout a half mile from where I had seen Megrahi lie slowly dying. They were corpses of black men lynched by the rebels because they were supposedly mercenaries fighting for the regime: though in reality, they were victims of xenophobia against African migrants which had accompanied the uprising.
Megrahi himself had been convicted of a dreadful massacre; of being responsible for 270 deaths on 21 December 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland. A bomb – 12 ounces of Semtex in a Toshiba radio-cassette player – had been secreted in the luggage of the plane carrying passengers to the US, many returning home for Christmas.
After spending eight years in Scottish prisons following his conviction, Megrahi had been returned to Libya on compassionate grounds following a diagnosis of prostate cancer. After a few months in prison in Tripoli, unable to walk and bedridden, he was allowed to return to his family home.
There was vengeful anger expressed by some in Britain, and more so in the US, at Megrahi’s return to Libya. He had faked his illness, it was claimed, and even if that was not the case, he had escaped justice by not actually dying in a cell. The charge of subterfuge was reinforced by the perception that his release was part of the many dodgy deals between Tony Blair’s government and Colonel Gaddafi’s regime.
We failed to learn from Lockerbie, and repeat our mistakes at peril
Yet there are good reasons to believe that the conviction of Megrahi was a shameful miscarriage of justice and that, as a result, the real perpetrators of one of the worst acts of terrorism in recent history remained free. That certainly was the view of many, including international jurists, intelligence officers, journalists who followed the case, and members of bereaved families. Among the latter group was Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing.
Dr Swire, a man of integrity and compassion, who became a spokesman for “UK Families 103” stressed that “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.”
Megrahi died in May 2012, a few months after I had seen him. Yet a campaign Dr Swire had helped set up, “Justice for Megrahi”, continues to help the Libyan’s family to seek a new appeal against the sentence in their efforts to posthumously clear his name.
Certainly, the chronology of the original investigation into the bombing is strange, raising serious questions about the official narrative.
Soon after the downing of the Pan Am flight, American and British security officials began laying the blame on an Iran-Syria axis. The suggested 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 PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command) which specialised in such operations.
HUNDREDS DIE AS JUMBO JET PLUNGES INTO TOWN
How The Independent first reported the news
Hundreds of people died last night when a Pan American jumbo jet carrying more than 250 people on a flight from London to New York broke up in mid-air and plunged on to the small Scottish town of Lockerbie.
The cause of the crash was not known last night, but a Pan Am spokesman, Jeff Kriendler, said “an incident” had occurred while the aircraft was flying at an altitude of 31,000 ft, but he refused to elaborate or speculate on the possible cause of the disaster. Since the craft was carrying a large number of US servicemen there was speculation that it could have been a terrorist bomb.
Early this morning, John Boyd, the Chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway, said that all 273 people on board were presumed dead. The number of ground casualties was still being assessed.
“The wreckage is spread over a very wide area – probably about 10 miles in radius. Parts of the wreckage have fallen on two residential areas in the town, causing considerable damage and setting fire to a number of houses.”
The town, 10 miles south-west of Dumfries, was devastated by a fireball 300 feet high as people ran from their homes in terror. The explosion blew a crater 20 feet deep and 100 feet long near the centre of the town, destroying many houses and killed a large number of townspeople. Early today, the whole of the southern side of the town was still on fire.
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 a Libyan intelligence officer, was finally extradited in 1999 – along with another man named as a suspect over the bombing, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, also allegedly employed by Libyan intelligence. The move came at a time when Colonel Gaddafi was in the process of getting back from into the international fold with the help of the British government.
I covered their trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, which took place in a specially constituted court, with a panel of Scottish judges, but without a jury, under Scots law. The two men were effectively charged with joint enterprise, conspiracy. Yet only Megrahi was found guilty. Fhimah had a cast iron alibi which the judges could not ignore. 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 was 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 – famously described the witness, Tony Gauci, as “an apple short of a picnic” and “not quite the full shilling”.
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.
The observer for the UN at the trial severely criticised the verdict as did many lawyers. 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.
Lockerbie: If not Megrahi, then who?
Show all 3
Behind the controversy, accusations and recriminations over who carried out the attack lay the human tragedy of Lockerbie, a scene which is difficult to forget, even after three decades, for many of us who went there.
The memories which remain are of roads covered by slates blown off roofs, homes burnt out, a huge section of fuselage lying on top of a flattened row of houses.
DEVASTATION AS AIRLINER WITH MORE THAN 270 ON BOARD BREAKS APART IN MID-AIR
How The Independent first reported the news, cont.
Parts of the aircraft landed up to 18 miles away from the town. Last night the fire brigade said that 16 bodies, including some of the crew, had been recovered from the front section of the plane, found four miles to the east of Lockerbie in a heavily wooded area. One of the rescue helicopter crews spotted the section. Another helicopter discovered two bodies, one of which was a child, at least two miles away.
First reports said that six or seven townspeople had died, but the final death toll is expected to rise. The main portion of the aircraft narrowly avoided a petrol station, but hit a number of houses and a flyover in the town itself. Vehicles on the A74 Glasgow to Carlisle road, which runs through the town were hit and exploded into flames. Some drivers are reported to have died.
Last night, the massive rescue operation involved all the emergency services. RAF and Army rescue teams and helicopters all working in what were described as horrendous conditions made worse by bad weather.
By midnight, a list of 50 townspeople whose homes were damaged but who survived unhurt was pinned to the outside of the Town Hall, used as an emergency mortuary. Bodies were taken to the mortuary by soldiers.
And bodies. Bodies which had fallen out of the sky, on farmland around the village, on a golf course, but also on buildings and peoples hedges, gardens and driveways, among scattered luggage and plane seats.
Eleven people on the ground had been killed too – very sad losses, though it seemed astonishing that the number wasn’t higher considering the scale of what had taken place.
There was overwhelming shock and grief among the residents as well as those who were arriving by the hour, the emergency services, the media and volunteers who came to help from surrounding areas. People gathered at pubs, one of them the St Mungo Arms I recall, to speak quietly about those missing and about what they had experienced themselves.
The search for bodies ended six weeks later. All of the 243 passengers and 16 crew members on Flight 103 were dead, inevitably. They came from 21 countries: 190 were American and 43 were British citizens. The families of some of the foreign victims went to Lockerbie in the following weeks and months; the people of the town opened their doors to them.
A little later we heard the cold statistical analysis of the disaster. The cockpit and the forward section of the Boeing 747, and those on board had plunged 31,000 feet to the ground, those parts of the aircraft falling on a field near Tudergarth Church, outside Lockerbie. The rest of the plane had gone into a steep dive from 31,000 feet to 19,000 feet before breaking up over the town – the two wings and the fuel tanks landing on a road, Sherwood Crescent. Around 1,500 tonnes of material was blown into the air, a crater of 145 feet gouged out of the ground.
The 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing this week will be marked by a “walk of peace” with people asked to gather at Burnswalk, an ancient landmark near the town; and there will be a special remembrance service at Tundergarth Church.
The Very Reverend Dr Alan McDonald, a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, who will lead the service, said: “The people who have been organising the service, and the walk the next day, wanted something that would focus on hope and the future. We will seek hope and peace for all on these days”.
Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, lays a wreath at Dryfesdale Cemetery, near Lockerbie in 2013
Dr Jan Hogarth, one of the organisers, added: “We hope to help shift people’s perspective from an area associated with tragedy to a special spiritual landscape with a courageous community who held this tragedy with love, compassion, and kindness.
“Thirty years on, you would hope humanity would work towards achieving peace. We don’t have time to look backward, we must work together to achieve this ambition.”
Father Patrick Keegans had just been appointed as parish priest in Lockerbie and was looking forward to his first Christmas there at the time of the crash. His tireless work with the traumatised community drew wide praise and is remembered with gratitude.
He reflected: “For those of us who experienced Lockerbie, the story will never come to an end. Lockerbie lives with us, we are part of Lockerbie and Lockerbie is part of us: the horror, the tragedy, the sadness, the grief, the support and the love that was shown – all of that stays with us.”
Father Keegans, who is now retired, joined the “Justice for Megrahi” campaign after meeting the convicted man’s family and is now backing the call for a fresh appeal.
Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent Minds
“I can’t live with myself being silent,” he explained, “when I’m truly convinced that this man has been unjustly convicted; Lockerbie is an unfinished story as far as the legal aspects are concerned.”
Megrahi died at his home in Tripoli still protesting his innocence. He thanked Dr Jim Swire and others who had believed in him.
In his final days, he said: “I pray for all those who died every day.
“I shall be meeting my God soon, but the truth will come out, I really hope the truth of what really happened will come out one day.” _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2019 11:04 pm Post subject:
The Crown Office under Elish Angiolini
Chief Constable John Boyd of what was then Dumfries and Galloway constabulary and
the Scottish Justice Ministry under Kenny MacAskill
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