NYT Admits Lockerbie Case Flaws

Robert Parry
May 21, 2012
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/05/21/nyt-admitconcedes-lockerbie-case-flaws

Exclusive: Even in death, Libyan Ali al-Megrahi is dubbed “the Lockerbie bomber,” a depiction that proved useful last year in rallying public support for “regime change” in Libya. But the New York Times now concedes, belatedly, that the case against him was riddled with errors and false testimony, as Robert Parry reports.

From the Now-They-Tell-Us Department comes the New York Times obit of Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted by a special Scottish court for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. After Megrahi’s death from cancer was announced on Sunday, the Times finally acknowledged that his guilt was in serious doubt.

Last year, when the Times and other major U.S. news outlets were manufacturing public consent for a new war against another Middle East “bad guy,” i.e. Muammar Gaddafi, Megrahi’s guilt was treated as flat fact. Indeed, citation of the Lockerbie bombing became the debate closer, effectively silencing anyone who raised questions about U.S. involvement in another war for “regime change.”


Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi
After all, who would “defend” the monsters involved in blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans? Again and again, the U.S.-backed military intervention to oust Gaddafi in 2011 was justified by Gaddafi’s presumed authorship of the Lockerbie terrorist attack.

Only a few non-mainstream news outlets, like Consortiumnews.com, bothered to actually review the dubious evidence against Megrahi and raise questions about the judgment of the Scottish court that convicted Megrahi in 2001.

By contrast to those few skeptical articles, the New York Times stoked last year’s war fever by suppressing or ignoring those doubts. For instance, one March 2011 article out of Washington began by stating: “There once was no American institution more hostile to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s’s pariah government than the Central Intelligence Agency, which had lost its deputy Beirut station chief when Libyan intelligence operatives blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Scotland in 1988.”

Note the lack of doubt or even attribution. A similar certainty prevailed in virtually all other mainstream news reports and commentaries, ranging from the right-wing media to the liberal MSNBC, whose foreign policy correspondent Andrea Mitchell would seal the deal by recalling that Libya had accepted “responsibility” for the bombing.

Gaddafi’s eventual defeat, capture and grisly murder brought no fresh doubts about the certainty of the guilt of Megrahi, who was simply called the “Lockerbie bomber.” Few eyebrows were raised even when British authorities released Libya’s former intelligence chief Moussa Koussa after asking him some Lockerbie questions.

Scotland Yard also apparently failed to notice the dog not barking when the new pro-Western Libyan government took power and released no confirmation that Gaddafi’s government indeed had sponsored the 1988 attack. After Gaddafi’s overthrow and death, the Lockerbie issue just disappeared from the news.

A Surprising Obit

So, readers of the New York Times’ obituary page might have been surprised Monday if they read deep into Megrahi’s obit and discovered this summary of the case:

“The enigmatic Mr. Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist but defended by many Libyans, and even some world leaders, as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.”

If you read even further, you would find this more detailed examination of the evidence:

“Investigators, while they had no direct proof, believed that the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Flight 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

“After a three-year investigation, Mr. Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted on mass murder charges in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion.  …

“Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999: the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

“The trial lasted 85 days. None of the witnesses connected the suspects directly to the bomb. But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing that forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified Mr. Megrahi as the buyer, although Mr. Gauci seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

“The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

“Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Mr. Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that Mr. Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase, and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

“On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found Mr. Megrahi guilty but acquitted Mr. Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that ‘there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt’ of Mr. Megrahi.

“Much of the evidence was later challenged. It emerged that Mr. Gauci had repeatedly failed to identify Mr. Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his photograph in a magazine and being shown the same photo in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

“Investigators said Mr. Bollier, whom even the court called ‘untruthful and unreliable,’ had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

“In 2007, Mr. Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for residue of explosives, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

“The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight was also cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

“Hans Köchler, a United Nations observer, called the trial ‘a spectacular miscarriage of justice,’ words echoed by Mr. Mandela. Many legal experts and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Mr. Megrahi a scapegoat for a Libyan government long identified with terrorism. While denying involvement, Libya paid $2.7 billion to the victims’ families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation.”

Prosecutorial Misconduct

In other words, the case against Megrahi looks to have been an example of gross prosecutorial misconduct, relying on testimony from perjurers and failing to pursue promising leads (like the possibility that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, not transferred from plane to plane to plane, an unlikely route for a terrorist attack and made even more dubious by the absence of any evidence of an unaccompanied bag being put on those flights).

Also, objective journalists should have noted that Libya’s much-touted acceptance of “responsibility” was simply an effort to get punishing sanctions lifted and that Libya always continued to assert its innocence.

All of the above facts were known in 2011 when the Times and the rest of the mainstream U.S. press corps presented a dramatically different version to the American people. Last year, all these questions and doubts were suppressed in the name of rallying support for “regime change” in Libya.

On March 18, 2011, I wrote: “As Americans turn to their news media to make sense of the upheavals in the Middle East, it’s worth remembering that the bias of the mainstream U.S. press corps is most powerful when covering a Washington-designated villain, especially if he happens to be Muslim.

“In that case, all uncertainty about some aspect of his villainy is discarded. Evidence in serious dispute is stated as flat fact. Readers are expected to share this unquestioned belief about the story’s frame – and that usually helps manufacture consent behind some desired government action or policy.

“At such moments, it’s also hard to contest the conventional wisdom. To do so will guarantee that you’ll be treated as some kook or pariah. It won’t even matter if you’re vindicated in the long run. You’ll still be remembered as some weirdo who was out of step.

“And those who push the misguided consensus will mostly go on to bigger and better things, as people who have proved their worth even if they got it all wrong. Such is the way the national U.S. political/media system now works – or some might say doesn’t work.

“Perhaps the most costly recent example of this pattern was the Official Certainty about Iraq’s WMD in 2002-03. With only a few exceptions, the major U.S. news media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, bought into the Bush administration’s WMD propaganda, partly because Saddam Hussein was so unsavory that no one wanted to be dubbed a ‘Saddam apologist.’

“When Iraq’s WMD turned out to be a mirage, there was almost no accountability at senior levels of the U.S. news media. Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who repeatedly reported Iraq’s WMD as ‘flat fact,’ is still in the same job eight years later; Bill Keller, who penned an influential article called  ’The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,’ got promoted to New York Times executive editor after the Iraq-WMD claims exploded leaving egg on the faces of him and his fellow club members.

“So, now as Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi reprises his old role as ‘mad dog of the Middle East,’ Americans are being prepped for another Middle East conflict by endlessly reading as flat fact that Libyan intelligence agents blew up Pan Am Flight 103 back in 1988.

“These articles never mention that there is strong doubt the Libyans had anything to do with the attack and that the 2001 conviction of Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi was falling apart in 2009 before he was released on humanitarian grounds, suffering from prostate cancer.

“Though it’s true that a Scottish court did convict Megrahi – while acquitting a second Libyan – the judgment appears to have been more a political compromise than an act of justice. One of the judges told Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about ‘enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction.’

“After the testimony of a key witness was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed in 2007 to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction out of a strong concern that it was a miscarriage of justice. However, again due to intense political pressure, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities agreed to release Megrahi on medical grounds.

“Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain an early release in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis, but that doesn’t mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his conviction.”

But today, the United States has anything but an objective press corps. That should be obvious when you contrast the U.S. media’s certitude about Megrahi’s guilt last year – when outrage over the Lockerbie bombing was crucial in lining up public acquiescence to another Middle East war – against the nuanced doubts noted in Megrahi’s New York Times obit on Monday.

To read more of Robert Parry’s writings, you can now order his last two books, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, at the discount price of only $16 for both.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

Looking at Lockerbie

(exclusive to Konformist)
By Kenn Thomas, steamshovelpress.com

It has been a decade since I was invited to speak at an assemblage of “conferences, round tables and youth camps” in Libya organized by the Jamahir Society for Culture and Philosophy. The arrangements had been made after I went through some trouble to get state department approval to travel to Libya, which was illegal at the time. I watched my flight to Paris, stopover to Tripoli, take off as I was still at the airport. One of the conference organizers was explaining to me on the phone why the airline was telling me the airfare had been “undercollected.” I could have paid the remainder of the fare, but I was reticent about the whole trip in the first place. The group had entitled the conference “Towards an Alternative World Order” but it clearly was funded by Moamammr Qadafi, whose government at the time was the chief suspect in the December 1988 Lockerbie tragedy. As a cheerleader for many alternative points of view, a world order based on such terrorism was not among them. Still, little had been settled about it and I felt that I could at least present at this conference, if it didn’t cost me anything but time. Whether it was just incompetence that the full airfare was never paid, or for some unstated reason — like maybe reading the abstract of my intended remarks - decided to disinvite me, I’ll probably never know, but some remnants of those remarks did eventually appear in the book review that follows.

One detail didn’t make it into the review: the Iranian connection. Ahmed Jibril, the Syrian terrorist mentioned in the review, played his role at the behest of leadership in Iran for jihadist revenge on the shoot down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing nearly 300 souls in July 1988. The captain of the Vincennes, Will Rogers III, later suffered a pipe bombing of his minivan, from which his wife barely escaped. As I’d figured, that’s not a terribly ordered alternative world.

Book Review

It should be noted up front that Libyan money is behind the publication of Foreign Agent 4221: The Lockerbie Cover-Up (Bridger House Publishers, Inc., POB 2208, Carson City, NV 89702), or at least behind its author, William C. Chasey. Chasey was by his own description a hard-nosed Republican political lobbyist and former marine who took up work as a foreign agent for Libya through a US company, International Communications Management (ICM). He figured he could accept the official US position of Libyan culpability in the December 1988 crash over Scotland of Pan Am Flight 103 and still pursue the valid need for diplomatic normalcy, and so registered for his book's title role. He was working to get exposure in Washington for Libyan denials of the US charges when OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, told him to cease work with the Libyans and froze what it determined was a bank account holding money from Libya. Chasey argues that his bankroll came from the American company ICM. Chasey also claims to have been harassed and spied upon. OFAC eventually fined him $50,000 and put him under investigation for fraud. All of this helped convince Chasey that the Libyans were right about their innocence in the downing of Pan Am 103.

Views of the Lockerbie disaster diverge over whether the bomb was placed by two Libyan agents, Abdel Bassett Ali Al-Megrahia and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, or by a Lebanese-American killed in the explosion named Khalid Jafaar, working on behalf Ahmed Jibril, a Syrian terrorist with the somewhat signature trademark of planting bombs in Toshiba tape decks like the one that contained the Pan Am 103 bomb. US and UK governments come down on the former conspiracy theory, having indicted the two Libyans in November 1991. Adherents of the second theory say that Jibril conned Khalid Jafaar into taking the bomb aboard with a shipment of heroin he knew the CIA would never do anything to stop. According to the theory, Jafaar also worked as a CIA drug-trafficking asset.

Filmmaker John Ashton claims to have heard off-the-record statements from searchers who scoured the Pan Am 103 crash site that American plain-clothes operatives came the day after the crash in a huff to find something, presumably the incriminating heroin. Ashton readily admits that initial funding for his film documentary on Lockerbie, The Maltese Double Cross, came from a business with ties to Libya ("How The CIA Blew Up Pan Am Flight 103," Night & Day, June 9, 1996.). Jim Swire, whose daughter died on the flight, has supported the idea of having Ashton's film distributed and discussed, but relatives of other victims have condemned it as an exploitation of their tragedy.

Others who have countenanced the second theory, though, include Lester Coleman, whose 1993 book Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie describes the "controlled delivery" tracking process allowed by the DEA for some heroin smuggling activity, an argument that actually exonerates US intelligence from deliberate trucking in heroin for profit. (In the book, Coleman also injected himself into the Casolaro/Inslaw story with the claim that he witnessed the unpacking of the surveillance software PROMIS from boxes marked "PROMIS Ltd, Toronto, Canada". Although it seemed unlikely that such secret dealings would be so trumpeted, the story supported Casolaro informant Michael Riconosciuto's allegations that the software had been sold to the Canadians.) An insurance investigator named Juval Aviv also verified the theory, but was accused of trying to clear Pan Am's security practices of blame for the Lockerbie disaster. Both Coleman and Juval Aviv claim to have since received the kind of harassment that Chasey says he suffered.

Lobbyists are not investigators. In fact, they are professional shmoozers. The most damning thing about the credibility of Foreign Agent 4221 is its photo section, showing author Chasey gripping and grinning with such unsavory people as Ed Meese, Dan Quayle, Pete Wilson, even George Bush and Ronald Reagan--and, of course, Muammar Qadhafi. So readers should be cautious that Chasey's book has an agenda, expressed explicitly in the introduction as trying to clear the Libyans of "sole" responsibility for the sabotage over Scotland. There is an attempt here to humanize Qadhafi and present the personal side of his losses in protracted struggle with the US (Qadhafi’s 16 month old daughter died in a 1986 US bombing). It also includes discussions with the two Libyans indicted for the crime. In the course of all that, it shows also how the CIA "protected Qadhafi and sanctioned his acquisition of the accoutrements of modern terrorism" in a scheme involving three tentacles of Casolaro's Octopus: Edwin Wilson, Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines. With the agenda antennae up, such tidbits of diplomatic/spook history make Foreign Agent 4221 compelling reading.

In the long run, maybe the paper trails of all the supporters of Pan Am 103 theory two will trace back to Qadhafi. Or maybe the CIA wants the public to believe that rumors of its involvement in heroin traffic are simply disinfo planted by the Libyans, despite how well they dovetail with a known history of CIA drug dealing stretching from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia to the American mafia. Interestingly, a new edition of Foreign Agent 4221, retitled Pan Am 103: The Lockerbie Cover-Up, is scheduled for publication in the UK and Chasey has had some contact with American publisher Warren Hinckle, who co-wrote The Fish Is Red book, which drew Peter Dale Scott's attention to Jose Basulto Leon's terrorist escapades, and who was unable to publish Lester Coleman's book in the US because its distributor, Publishers Group West, bowed to lawsuit pressure.

Megrahi was framed

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/09/pilger-megrahi-justice

Megrahi was framed
John Pilger
03 September 2009

The trial of the “Lockerbie bomber” was worse than a travesty of justice. Evidence that never came to court proves his innocence

The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown's "repulsion" to Barack Obama's "outrage", the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. "But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?" whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. "What will you say to your constituents, then?"

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he "pays" for his "heinous crime": the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose "compassion" allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to "face justice from a higher power". Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as "a babbling brook of bullshit". Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi's release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests".

“The endgame came down to damage limitation," said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, "because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi's] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice." New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft - he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, "discovered" in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi's suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was "transferred" through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A "key secret witness" at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused, al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted), loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a "protected witness". The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans' conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in "neutral" Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a "mass of conflicting evidence" and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page "opinion", wrote Foot, "is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice". (His report, Lockerbie - the Flight from Justice, can be downloaded from www.private-eye.co.uk for £5.)

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the "architect" of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr on 11 January 1990, she agreed to "low-key" the disaster after their intelligence services had reported "beyond doubt" that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group, contracted by Tehran, as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship's captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer".

Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran's support as he built a "coalition" to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. "Like lazy and overfed fish," wrote Foot, "the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and open warmongering against Libya." The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be the centrepiece of Megrahi's defence.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi's case for appeal. "The commission is of the view," said its chairman, Graham Forbes, "based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice."

The words "miscarriage of justice" are entirely missing from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that "higher power". What a disgrace.

It was Megrahi’s appeal that concerned the US

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5085.shtml

It was Megrahi’s appeal, not his health, that concerned the US and Britain
By William Blum
Online Journal Guest Writer
Sep 3, 2009

“And on the most exalted throne in the world sits nothing but a man’s arse.” --Montaigne

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable.” His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting.” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed,” while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.” [1]

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations,” that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.[2] No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident.” Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case.[3] The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non: loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport -- for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.” [4]

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany -- guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed -- until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus, it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya -- the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq -- that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.[5]

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. . . . I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.” [6]

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.” [7]

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Notes

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009

2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992

3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009

4. “Opinion of the Court,” Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001

5. Read many further details about the case at killinghope.org.

6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009

7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009

William Blum is the author of “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2,” “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” “West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir” and “Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire.”

‘I’LL REVEAL TRUE IDENTITY OF BOMBER’

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/122299/-I-ll-reveal-true-identity-of-bomber

‘I’LL REVEAL TRUE IDENTITY OF BOMBER’
Megrahi is to point the finger
Sunday August 23,2009
By Ben Borland

AN AMERICAN citizen is to be named by the Lockerbie bomber as the man who really carried out the terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103.

Lawyers for the bomber were to argue that an “elusive” terrorist codenamed Abu Elias planted the bomb in December 1988, causing the deaths of 270 innocent people.

Megrahi is now expected to identify the man behind this alias.

The Scottish Sunday Express tracked this man down to his home in the US, and he strongly denied having anything to do with the atrocity.

However, we can reveal that he has connections to at least two international terrorists and a Palestinian terror group, as well as links to the US intelligence services.

The man, who works as a schools engineer for the US government, was to become the central figure in Megrahi’s aborted appeal.

‘Elias’, a commander in a Palestinian terror organisation, was identified as the CIA’s primary Lockerbie suspect but was never caught.

Sources close to Megrahi believe he may actually have been a double agent working for the FBI or the CIA.

Last night the man, who we have chosen not to name, said: “Sorry, I don’t think that I can help in this case. It is a clear case of either mistaken identity and/or fabrication.

“I don’t wish my name to be mentioned in any capacity in the press. I am sure you understand the sensitivity of this matter since I have a family and children.”

However, Christine Grahame MSP, who visited Megrahi in Greenock prison and campaigned for his release, is believed to be considering naming the man in the Scottish Parliament chamber.

She said: “It is apparent that US intelligence has known or must have known the primary suspect of the Lockerbie bombing was alive and living safely in Washington.

“There has been a suggestion made that he is in some way an ‘intelligence asset’ for the US and that is why he has been allowed to live in peace.

“He must be deeply relieved that Megrahi was forced to drop his appeal and that he will never face justice for this atrocity.”

Yesterday, Megrahi promised that before he dies he will present new evidence gathered for the appeal which will exonerate him. He said he will call on the British and Scottish people “to be the jury”.

The man Megrahi believes was Abu Elias now lives in a suburban neighbourhood near Washington’s Dulles airport, just a few miles from the White House and the Lockerbie memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. He even has his own Facebook social network page.

He is the nephew of Syrian terror warlord Ahmed Jibril, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Jibril was allegedly paid $10 million by Iran to bomb an American passenger jet in retaliation for the US Navy accidentally shooting down an Iranian plane earlier in 1988, killing all 298 pilgrims on board.

The man is also related to Nezar Hindawi, a Syrian currently serving a 45-year sentence in Whitemoor high-security prison in Cambridgeshire for plotting to blow up an Israeli jet flying from Heathrow to Tel Aviv in 1986.

A document submitted to the appeal court by Megrahi’s lawyers states: “The FBI had apparently investigated ‘X’ and knew he was the nephew of Ahmed Jibril.

“‘X’ had met with FBI special agents [an appointment was in his diary for August 1988] but neither ‘X’ nor the Department of Justice would disclose who the agents were or the precise purpose of the recorded meeting. ‘X’ admitted the meeting had taken place. It is inconceivable that he did not produce his Syrian passport for examination. Only extracts from his US passport were revealed.

“Once again, the hand of the US government appeared to be guiding matters behind the scenes.”

‘Elias’ was also connected to Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian named by Dumfries and Galloway Police as their chief suspect less than a year after the bombing. The true identity of ‘Elias’ first came to light during a closed hearing at the Lockerbie trial in Holland in 2001, which led to Megrahi’s conviction.

However, the defence claim that attempts to investigate further were dismissed as a “fishing” exercise by the then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd.

There is further evidence to link the PFLP-GC to the disaster, as first reported by the Scottish Sunday Express in 2004.

In October 1988, following a tip-off from the CIA, German police raided a PFLP-GC safe house in Neuss and discovered a bomb in a Toshiba cassette player, identical to the one which exploded on board Flight 103, as well as a Pan Am timetable.

Codenamed Autumn Leaves, the raid resulted in 16 arrests including that of cell leader Hafez Dalkamoni, later convicted for a bombing campaign on German railways, and ­Marwan Khreesat, a double agent for the Jordanian intelligence service.

Khreesat said in an interview with an FBI agent that he had been introduced to a man called Abu Elias, an explosives and airline security expert who had been “giving orders”.

Another member of the terror cell, Mobdi Goben, later disclosed Elias’s true identity in a deathbed confession which became known as the Goben Memorandum during the Camp Zeist trial. Goben claimed ‘Elias’ placed a bomb in the luggage of Khaled Jafar, a Lebanese/American from Detroit who died on board Pan Am Flight 103.

A source close to Megrahi said yesterday that ‘Elias’ could have been spying for the Americans.

The source said: “Not only was Abu Elias known to the Americans, but what if he was working for them? The guy comes into the US from the former Soviet Union, he’s the nephew of Ahmed Jibril – the Bin Laden of his day – and he just strolls into the US?

“I think they turned him, and I think he operated as a double agent.

“Khreeshat said if they had waited one more day they would have got Elias in the Autumn Leaves raid.Goben says Elias put the bomb into Jafar’s case without his knowledge.

“Abu Elias was a prime suspect. An American double agent was responsible for bringing down an American plane. How good a reason for a cover-up would that be?”

Lockerbie bomber: I will prove I am innocent

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6070571/Lockerbie-bomber-I-will-prove-I-am-innocent.html

Lockerbie bomber: I will prove I am innocent
The Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, has claimed he will provide evidence that he was not prove he was not responsible for the terrorist attack which claimed the lives of 270 people.
By James Kirkup and Aislinn Simpson
22 Aug 2009

Megrahi, who was released from a Scottish prison on Thursday and returned to a hero's welcome in Libya, would not say who he thought was responsible for blowing up the Pan Am flight in 1988.

Megrahi promised that before he died he would present new evidence through his Scottish lawyers that would exonerate him.

He told The Times at his home in Tripoli: “My message to the British and Scottish communities is that I will put out the evidence and ask them to be the jury,” he said. He would not elaborate.

“If there is justice in the UK I would be acquitted or the verdict would be quashed because it was unsafe. There was a miscarriage of justice.”

He said he understood the anger of victims' families, saying: “They believe I’m guilty which in reality I’m not. One day the truth won’t be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: ‘The truth never dies’.”

When the paper asked who he believed brought down the plane he said: “It’s a very good question but I’m not the right person to ask.” The Times reported that Megrahi insisted that it was not Libya and would not be drawn on suggestions that it was Syria, Iran or the Palestinians.

Megrahi, 57, was released by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, on compassionate grounds as he is suffering from terminal prostate cancer.

Megrahi said he was "very, very happy" to be freed. "This was my hope and wish — to be back with my family before I pass away . . . I always believed I would come back if justice prevailed,” he said.

President Obama has condemned the welcome Megrahi received in Libya as 'highly objectionable'.

Mr Obama's chief spokesman, Robert Gibbs, earlier denounced the scenes in the Libyan capital Tripoli when returned home as "outrageous and disgusting".

Speaking before he left the White House to spend the weekend at Camp David, Mr Obama led US condemnation of the bomber's return.

"It was highly objectionable," he said in reference to the release and arrival at Tripoli's airport of Megrahi, where he was greeted by hundreds of people on Thursday night.

Mr Gibbs said: "The images that we saw in Libya yesterday were outrageous and disgusting.

"We communicated with the Libyan government, we continue to watch what they do in the days going forward about this individual, and understand that the video that you saw yesterday was tremendously offensive to the survivors that lost a loved one in 1988."

Relatives of the Americans killed in the 1998 atrocity, when a Pan Am jet was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland, said they planned to converge on New York to mount a protest at the presence of the Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi when he attends the United Nations General Assembly on Sept 23.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that the reception Libya gave Megrahi was "deeply distressing".

The Foreign Office is now understood to be reviewing a plan for Prince Andrew to represent Britain at celebrations marking 40 years of Col Gaddafi's rule.

The prince, a British trade envoy, has made several previous trips to Libya, where several large British energy firms hold oil and gas contracts.

A Foreign Office source said that the level of Britain's representation at the event is now being reconsidered.

The Scottish decision has triggered a backlash. The Foreign Secretary's comments came amid furious reactions to the decision by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to free on compassionate grounds the biggest mass murderer in British legal history.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Miliband condemned the scenes of celebration and flag-waving in Libya as Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only man convicted of the 1988 atrocity, flew home to Tripoli.

"Obviously the sight of a mass murderer getting a hero's welcome in Tripoli is deeply upsetting, deeply distressing," he said.

"Above all for the 270 families who grieve every day for the loss of their loved ones 21 years ago and also for anyone who has an ounce of humanity in them. I think that that is the overriding emotion that people will be feeling today."

Megrahi, 57, a former intelligence agent who has terminal prostate cancer, was greeted in Tripoli by a crowd of thousands along with relatives and the Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saif al Islam Gaddafi.

Saif al-Islam, who travelled to Scotland to accompany Megrahi back to Libya, said that Megrahi's release was linked to trade deals between Britain and the oil rich African state.

"In all commercial contracts, for oil and gas with Britain, (Megrahi) was always on the negotiating table," Saif al-Islam said in interview to Libyan TV channel Al Mutawassit taped on the flight back to Tripoli.

"All British interests were linked to the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi."

The Foreign Office, however, strongly denied claims that the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Al Megrahi was linked to trade agreements, insisting the decision to release him was made solely on compassionate grounds and was purely a matter for the Scottish authorities.

"There is no deal. All decisions relating to the Megrahi case have been exclusively for Scottish ministers, the Crown Office in Scotland, and the Scottish judicial authorities," a spokesman said.

"No deal has been made between the UK government and the Libyan government in relation to Megrahi and any commercial interests in the country."

After he left Scottish soil, Megrahi, who has served eight years of a 27-year sentence, released a statement protesting his innocence and expressing his "sympathy" for the families of the 270 people he was convicted of killing.

Bush Involvement in Bombing Pan Am 103

From The Konformist Vault:

Sometime in 1996-98, The Konformist published this article, based on excerpts from the book The Crimes of a President: New Revelations on Conspiracy & Cover-Up in the Bush & Reagan Administrations, written by Israeli journalist Joel Bainerman. With the recent news coverage of the release of the alleged Pan Am 103 bomber, it's worth sending out in cyberspace again.

Joel Bainerman can be reached via his bitchin' website: JoelBainerman.com

Bush Administration's Involvement in Bombing Pan Am 103
by Joel Bainerman

If the entire story behind the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 is ever fully exposed, most people just simply wouldn’t believe it. Not only were various agencies of the U.S. Government at least partially responsible for the terrorist attack, the Bush Administration tried to cover up their involvement; and, as vice president, Bush is reported to have made as many as four secret trips to Damascus offering arms to Syria in return for the hostages held in Lebanon.

If the true story behind Pan Am 103 ever finally does come out, Yuval Aviv can take much of the credit.

I met a lot of strange characters during the research for my book The Crimes of a President (SPI Books, 1992), but Yuval Aviv was by far the most intriguing. I met Aviv for the first time in October 1991. After a three-hour meeting, I walked out of his Madison Avenue office with my head spinning. Aviv had a certain charm about him that made him very likable, even if you didn’t quite trust his information or understand his motives. He claims to be a former Mossad official who immigrated to the U.S. in 1978. Shortly thereafter, he opened his own investigating firm called Interfor.

Aviv told me a lot of stories, some of which I had already checked out and found to be false. Some were verified by other sources. Like most sources investigative journalists come across, some of Aviv’s information was good, some wasn’t. Where Aviv does come through with flying colors though is in his version of what happened to Pan Am 103, the plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland on 21 December 1988.

Aviv’s firm was hired by Pan Am’s insurer in the Spring of 1989 to investigate the crash. Of all the journalists and intelligence sources I met who knew Aviv, all of them agreed that his report on Pan Am 103 is the closest thing yet to the truth. The only problem is that what he has to say about the incident isn’t what the Bush Administration wants to hear. In September 1989, Interfor’s report was made public. In it, Aviv claimed that a CIA team headquartered in Western Germany is largely responsible for the bombing.

That’s not what the U.S. Administration claims. For the first two years after the crash, all the evidence pointed to Syria and Iran as the culprits. It was believed that Iran bankrolled the operation in retaliation for the 3 July 1988 shooting down of a scheduled Iranian airbus in the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 people. Previously, U.S. investigators had traced a wire transfer of several million dollars from Teheran to a bank account in Vienna controlled by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command under the leadership of Ahmed Jibril (US News & World Report, 25 November 199l).

The outbreak of the Gulf War changed all that. When Saddam’s troops rolled into Kuwait, the Administration needed to bring Syria into the coalition effort. The following Summer, Bush sat down with Syrian President Hafez Assad in Geneva and ushered in a new era in Syrian-American relations. As a result, focus had to be deflected away from Syrian-sponsored Ahmed Jibril’s terrorist group.

Lo and behold, in November 199l, U.S. prosecutors announced that their three-year investigation produced no evidence that either Iran or Syria were involved. Instead, they believed two Libyan intelligence officials and the Tripoli Government were responsible for the bombing (New York Times, 15 November 199l). President Bush would publicly remark: "The Syrians took a bum rap on this" (Time, 27 April 1992).

The U.S. Government based its case on a tiny piece of plastic embedded in a shirt that had come from the suitcase that held the bomb. Miraculously, it survived two harsh Scottish winters. A British forensic expert matched the fragment of the bomb timer used to destroy a French DC-10 jet that exploded over Africa nine months after the Lockerbie tragedy and found them to be identical. Based on this evidence, indictments were issued for Libyan intelligence officials. (It seems the Justice Department would have looked a little silly asking Mummar Gaddafi to turn himself in to the American authorities.)

American and British investigators speculate that Iran and Libya were plotting simultaneously to blow up an American jet, but the Libyans succeeded first. Gaddafi, it was claimed, wanted revenge for the 1986 bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi by U.S. warplanes. (Why did he wait more than two-and-a-half years to get it?) They say the bomb was first loaded as unaccompanied baggage on an Air Malta flight which departed Lauq Airport in Malta and connected with the Pan Am flight in Frankfurt. Why a terrorist would take such an indirect route and risk detection was left unexplained.

The official U.S. Government’s version of events is quite different from that of the former Israeli intelligence official. Aviv explains that his investigation revealed that the origin of the terrorist attack was actually a rogue CIA group protecting a Syrian drug operation which transported drugs from the Middle East to the United States via Frankfurt. Aviv says the CIA did nothing to break up the drug operation because the traffickers were also helping them send weapons to Iran and to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Part of Aviv’s assertions were backed up by NBC News a year later when it reported, on 30 October 1990, that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was investigating a Middle East-based heroin operation to determine whether it was used by the terrorists to place a bomb on Pan Am 103. NBC said Pan Am flights out of Frankfurt had been used by the DEA to fly informants and heroin into Detroit as part of its sting operation. It claimed the terrorists might have discovered what the DEA was doing and switched one of their bags with one containing the bomb.

The DEA denied any connection to the undercover operation (Barron's, 17 December 1990). Aviv explains that the method of drug smuggling was quite simple. One person would check a piece of luggage onto the plane and an accomplice working in the baggage department would switch it with an identical piece containing the narcotics. He says that on that fatal night, a Syrian terrorist organization knew how the drug operation worked and slipped a bomb inside a suitcase on the plane.

Aviv asserts that Monzer Al-Kassar, a Syrian drug and arms smuggler, set the drug smuggling operation up through Frankfurt in 1987. The CIA, the DEA and the West German secret police, the BKA, observed its activities, but didn’t interfere so as to acquire information. Al-Kassar is well connected. The head of Syrian intelligence, Ali Issa Duba, is his brother-in-law, and his wife is related to Assad.

This was the same Monzer Al-Kassar who helped Oliver North supply Polish-made weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in 1985 and 1986. Along with his three brothers, Al-Kassar had built a multi-million-dollar empire on military deals in Eastern and Western Europe. Administration officials who discussed these deals said Al-Kassar had clear business links with the Abu Nidal terrorist organization (Los Angeles Times, 17 July 1987).

The officials said that Al-Kassar maintained offices in Warsaw and was a major broker of the Polish-owned weapons company, Cenzin. The first arms purchase by North from Al-Kassar totaling $1 million was sent by boat to an unidentified Caribbean port in the Fall of 1985 and was later distributed to the Contra fighters. In April of that year, a second shipment of Polish arms was sold to the CIA as part of this transaction (Los Angeles Times, 17 July 1987). In another part of the deal, more than $42 million was laundered through BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) accounts in the Cayman Islands. Al-Kassar earned more than $1 million (Private Eye, 25 October 199l).

Aviv wrote in his report that a special hostage rescue team was on the doomed aircraft, led by Army Major Charles McKee, who had discovered that a rogue CIA team in Frankfurt, called COREA, was protecting the drug route. According to a special report in Time (27 April 1992), COREA used front companies for its overseas operations: Sevens Mantra Corp., AMA Industries, Wilderwood Video and Condor Television Ltd. The report revealed that Condor did its banking through the First American Bank, a subsidiary of BCCI.

After explaining what he had learned to CIA headquarters in the U.S. and receiving no response, McKee decided to take his men home without the required permission. He planned to bring back to the U.S. proof of the rogue intelligence team’s connection to Al-Kassar. If the government tried to cover it up, he would release it. Al-Kassar discovered this and reported McKee’s attempt to make their own "travel arrangements" back to the U.S. through the rogue CIA team in Frankfurt (Covert Action Information Bulletin Number 34, Summer 1990).

Although neglected in the American press, there were at least four, and possibly as many as eight, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agency operatives from Beirut aboard Pan Am 103 (ibid.). Could they have been the target? In his book, Lockerbie: The Tragedy of Flight 103, David Johnson disclosed that CIA investigators removed a suitcase from the crash site that belonged to McKee. It was returned a few days later, and "found" empty.

The PBS investigative program Frontline reported in January 1990 that the bomb was put on the plane at London’s Heathrow Airport where a baggage handler switched suitcases belonging to CIA officer Matthew Gannon. According to the Frontline investigation, the only piece of luggage not accounted for from the flight belonged to Gannon.

Frontline claims the intelligence officials were a "strong secondary target." A May 1989 report in the Arabic newspaper Al-Dustur revealed that McKee’s teams’ movements were being monitored by David Lovejoy, "an American agent" whom Aviv claims was passing information to the Iranian embassy in Beirut which told the Iranian charge d’affaires of the team’s travel plans (Time, 27 April 1992).

Aviv believes that the CIA team in Frankfurt allowed Al-Kassar to continue to smuggle drugs into the U.S. in return for help in arranging the release of the American hostages. The drug operation, he says, went as far back as Spring of 1987.

In the Fall of 1988, Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, discovered the operation. So as not to interfere with Al-Kassar’s activities, Jibril originally targeted an American Airlines plane, but the Mossad discovered this and tipped off the airline. When the plan changed and the target became a Pan Am airliner, once again a Mossad agent tipped off German secret police 24 hours before the flight. When a BKA surveillance agent keeping watch over the suitcase supposedly filled with drugs noticed that this time the luggage was a different color and size, he passed this information on to the CIA team, who relayed it to their superiors. They reportedly said, "Don’t worry about it. Don’t stop it — let it go" (Barron's, 17 December 1990).

Aviv says the BKA did just that.

A lengthy article on Aviv’s report in the financial weekly, Barron's, quotes one Mideast Intelligence specialist in the government as suggesting, "Do I think the CIA was involved? Of course they were involved. And they screwed up. Was the operation planned by the top? Probably not. I doubt they sanctioned heroin importation — that came about at the more zealous lower levels. But they knew what was going on and didn’t care." The expert went on to say that his agency has "things that support Aviv’s allegation, but we can’t prove it. We have no smoking gun. And until the other agencies of the government open their doors, we will have no smoking gun."

These government agencies didn’t open their doors. In September 1989, Pan Am subpoenaed the FBI, CIA, FAA, DEA, National Security Council, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department, requesting documents relating to the case. According to Pan Am’s attorney, Gregory Buhler, "the government quashed the subpoenas on grounds of national security" (ibid.).

Further signs of a cover up were revealed by investigative columnist Jack Anderson, who claimed that President Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher held a transatlantic phone conversation after Bush’s inauguration in which they agreed that the investigation into the case should be "limited" in order to avoid harming the two nations’ intelligence communities. Thatcher has acknowledged that the conversation took place, but denied she and Bush conspired to interfere with the investigation (Covert Action Information Bulletin Number 34, Summer 1990).

In its investigative report, Time revealed that a former agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lester Knox Coleman, III, has signed an affidavit which described the CIA-sanctioned operation. In 1987, Coleman was transferred to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and was assigned to Cyprus, where he witnessed the growing trade in heroin originating in Lebanon. Coleman’s DEA front in Nicosia was the Eurame Trading Co. Ltd., located near the U.S. Embassy. His job was to keep track of Al-Kassar’s movements and report to the DEA attaché in Cyprus, Michael Hurley. Coleman says he was paid in checks drawn on the BCCI branch in Luxembourg (27 April 1992). (Read Trail of the Octopus: Behind the Lockerbie Disaster, Donald Goddard with Lester K. Coleman, 1994 — although this was only published in Great Britain and is a bit hard to get a copy of. ARH.)

A number of investigative journalists believe that Aviv stumbled onto just one piece of a larger puzzle. In August 1991, Larry Cohler, a writer for the Washington Jewish Week, reported on a set of secret negotiations which took place between Syria and the United States Government over the release of the hostages and which led to a number of covert trips by Bush to Damascus.

Over an all-you-can-eat Indian lunch one afternoon, Larry told me an incredible story that compliments Aviv’s conclusions.

According to a confidential Pentagon memo that Cohler gained access to, for reasons still unknown, officials in the Reagan Administration failed to pursue a series of Syrian offers to free the American hostages held in Lebanon. The Syrian overtures began in 1985 and continued through mid-1989.

A number of former government officials involved in the secret Syrian negotiations say they were never told why the Syrian offers were not acted upon, while others say the Syrian offers were not genuine. Still others claim there was too little preliminary action by the U.S. Government to determine for certain whether the initiatives were genuine or not (San Francisco Chronicle, 21 July 199l).

The center of the controversy was a memo dated 17 March 1987, which described a meeting attended by Lawrence Ropka, Jr., a principal deputy of Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Affairs Richard Armitage. Written by Ropka’s military assistant, Lt. Andrew Gambara, it claimed that American businessmen and a former executive secretary to Richard Nixon, Robert D. Ladd, told Pentagon officials in December 1985 that he had a contact with a Lebanese businessman who introduced him to Fasih Makhail Ashi, a judge in Syria’s inspector general’s office. The judge claimed he had information regarding the fate of the seven American hostages held in Lebanon. Ashi said: "the Syrians were prepared to assist in the release of the hostages if Reagan called Assad and requested his support" (San Francisco Chronicle, 21 July 199l).

Syria’s aims were simple enough: It wanted closer ties with the United States. The memo said that once Reagan called, "Syria would facilitate the release and transfer of the hostages without any quid pro quo from the U.S." It said further that Ladd had already brought this to the attention of Oliver North at the National Security Council (NSC) and that someone would follow it up. A former official in Armitage’s office said the memo was sent to a special government agency, the Vice President’s Task Force on Terrorism, a group of high-ranking officials from the White House, State Department, NSC and the CIA.

Two of Armitage’s aides acknowledged that the Syrian initiative was discussed during a number of interviews with Ladd and his attorney. Ladd said that, after hearing the Syrian offer, he arranged for Ashi to come to the United States; he was then questioned over a period of a number of days by the Task Force. Ashi asserts he spoke in the name of General Ghazi Kenaan, head of Syrian military intelligence, and even passed on details about the fate of kidnapped CIA chief in Beirut, William Buckley.

Ashi returned to Syria but received no reply. In February 1987, he contacted Ladd and again said Syria would help the Americans release the hostages. Ladd tried unsuccessfully to persuade government officials to meet in Paris with Ashi. A longtime senior aid to Armitage claimed Ashi could not prove the offer was genuine. "It was my sense there was nothing there," he said (San Francisco Examiner, 21 July 1991). "I was told there wasn’t enough information from Ashi to run it upstairs."

However, a former official in Armitage’s office said that he thought Ashi’s overtures should at least be checked out, as the American Government could have sent someone from the Paris embassy to meet him. Ladd said that, only because of his persistence, U.S. intelligence officials eventually agreed to meet with Ashi. Then, in the early part of the Summer of 1989 the CIA, without any explanation, canceled the meeting.

Despite the cancellation, Ashi called Ladd back saying that the hostages would be released if Ladd would come to Damascus for them. In August, Ladd was prepared to fly to Damascus when Ashi called back to take back the offer, saying that a tug of war over releasing the hostages had developed between Kenaan and other factions of the Syrian army.

The Congressional investigators did look into why the Administration didn’t follow up on these initiatives and why, when Syria offered to help release the hostages, they were put on hold. They questioned a number of individuals, including a former Pentagon official, Peter Probst, who took part in some of the meetings; he told Cohler that it was one of several he and other officials had with Ladd on the Syrian overture. He said nothing further on the matter.

Could the Administration have been pursuing another path to free the hostages? Cohler learned from different sources that Bush made as many as four secret trips to Damascus in early 1986, allegedly offering arms to Syria in return for the hostages. Congressional investigators were told by their sources that in the Spring of 1988, in the middle of the presidential campaign, Bush made one final trip to Syria, telling the Syrians that the time was right to make a deal. Then, the Syrians stalled.

At that point, the Syrians might have grasped the leverage they actually had over Bush and wanted to up the ante (In These Times, 7 August 1991). It’s also possible that Bush might have been attempting an "October Surprise" of his own by having the hostages delivered to a Republican White House just in time for the Presidential election in November 1988.

Aviv says that when these overtures failed, Bush and the CIA turned to Al-Kassar as a middlemen. (A covert deal made with drug smugglers is less likely to be exposed than one with a government or head of state.) Al-Kassar had some experience in these types of operations and at least one victory under his belt: He was used by the French Government in March 1988 to free its hostages held in captivity in Lebanon.

George Bush may have wanted the same deal.

'Too many questions are still unanswered'

Robalini's Note: Read between the lines and the truth is revealed: Megrahi was given "compassionate release" in exchange for dropping his appeals, which would've opened up previously suppressed evidence. The US and UK governments will never admit this, but their protest of his release is feigned. The evidence would likely confirm the case against Megrahi was a sham and the Libyans were framed to protect the real bombers...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/families-reaction-too-many-questions-are-still-unanswered-1775215.html

Families' reaction: 'Too many questions are still unanswered'
By Jonathan Brown
Friday, 21 August 2009

The families of the British victims called for a full independent inquiry into the bombing yesterday.

In contrast to their American counterparts, relatives on this side of the Atlantic have remained sceptical of the evidence brought against Megrahi and voiced support for the decision to release him, although they spoke of their frustration that his decision to abandon his appeal may mean the true culprits are never brought to justice.

Jean Berkley, 78, whose son Alistair, a Lockerbie resident, was 29 when he died, said: "Our big disappointment is that he had unnecessarily dropped his appeal, because he didn't need to drop the appeal in order to have compassionate release," she said.

"We were attaching a lot of importance to the appeal. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review said there were grounds for the appeal and we cannot now hear the new evidence that made them come to that decision. We know very little really and we are not in a position to make a judgement. We are left with a mystery here."

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died on Flight 103, welcomed the Libyan's release and said he would now focus on other countries' roles in the attack, including Britain. "He should be able to go straight home to his family and spend his last days there," he said. "I don't believe this man was involved in the way he was found to be involved."

Martin Cadman, 84, whose son Bill, 32, was killed, said: "I'm very pleased he has been released on compassionate grounds because I don't think he was the right person to be there anyway. It is just righting a wrong."

Professor Robert Black, the Scottish barrister who helped devise the original trial format, said: "It gets him home to die, which has been his primary objective and I'm pleased – but saddened he will die a convicted man. The appeal which might have cleared his name was abandoned unnecessarily."

Lockerbie bombing: victim's father to sue

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/scotland/6034698/Lockerbie-bombing-victims-father-to-sue.html

Lockerbie bombing: victim's father to sue
The leading campaigner for justice over the Lockerbie tragedy, Dr Jim Swire, is planning a ground-beaking legal action more than 20 years after the terrorist attack that claimed 270 lives.
Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
15 Aug 2009

Dr Swire, whose daughter Flora, 24, died in the attack, is preparing to sue the Scottish prosecution service because he is convinced it deliberately blocked attempts to bring his daughter's "real" killers to court.

He is planning the action under human rights legislation just three days after it was disclosed that the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is likely to be released later this month.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, 57, who has terminal prostate cancer and is expected to be freed on compassionate grounds, has always protested his innocence.

Dr Swire, 73, a spokesman for the relatives of the victims, is convinced that Megrahi was wrongly convicted.

His supporters claim that international politics prevented the truth from being uncovered during the investigation into the mid-air explosion which caused the deaths of 259 people on board Pan Am Flight 103 and a further 11 on the ground.

Dr Swire has told of his determination to bring his daughter's killers to justice in a letter sent to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, in which he is critical of the Crown Office, which is responsible for criminal prosecutions in Scotland.

In the letter, he highlights the fact that evidence from a Heathrow security guard was suppressed for more than 12 years and did not figure at Megrahi's trial in 2000 and 2001.

The guard revealed that Pan Am's baggage area at Heathrow was broken into 17 hours before Flight 103 took off from the airport for New York.

Dr Swire believes that this was probably when the bomb was planted, not much earlier on a flight from Malta.

In his letter, sent on Aug 10, Dr Swire says that he is now "reluctantly" looking at two projects:

- "To take action against the Crown Office under Human Rights legislation, since I now believe that the Crown Office has deliberately obstructed my rights to know who killed my daughter and why she was not protected, and continues to do so," and

- "To seek annulment of the findings of the Lockerbie Fatal Accident Inquiry [of 1990] on grounds of withholding of evidence about Heathrow, and then to seek a new FAI or legitimate equivalent in its place."

Critics of Megrahi's conviction have long believed that the Libyan was the victim of a US-led conspiracy to "frame" the country and its ruler, Col Muammar Gaddafi, for the bombing on Dec 21, 1988, when the plane exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie less than 40 minutes after take-off.

Many, including Dr Swire, now believe that the most likely to group to have carried out the bombing was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC).

At the time, the group was headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian Army captain, who was based in Damascus and funded by Iran.

Dr Swire suspects Iran was seeking revenge for the shooting-down of Iran Air Flight 655, with the loss of 290 lives, by the USS Vincennes in July 1988 – just five months before Lockerbie. Iran did not accept the US's claim that the incident was a mistake.

Dr Swire believes the families of the victims have been "pawns in a political scenario that had nothing to do with truth".

He added: "The Heathrow break-in would have been the perfect scenario for the Syrian-backed PFLP-GC to put one of its bombs on the aircraft."

The grieving father also suspects that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now the anti-Western president of Iran but then reportedly an ambitious figure in Iran's Republican Guard, may have been involved in Lockerbie.

Another suspect is Abu Talb, a Palestinian later arrested and jailed in Sweden for terrorist bombings: he had circled the date of December 21 1988 in a calendar found at his flat.

Other relatives, particularly those in the US seeking "closure" over the tragedy, still think the right man was convicted and want Megrahi to die in jail.

The Libyan was convicted by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands. Another suspect was acquitted.

Critics say the evidence against Megrahi was, at best, circumstantial, and, at worst, flimsy. His lawyers have dismissed the evidence of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper and the key prosecution witness.

He said he had sold clothes to Megrahi which had supposedly been in the suitcase that contained the bomb.

But it later emerged that Mr Gauci had seen a photograph of the suspect in a magazine linking him to the bombing. Other witnesses, it is alleged, were paid or offered money to give damaging evidence against the Libyan.

Professor Robert Black QC, the architect of the original trial and a leading academic lawyer, also believes that Megrahi was convicted on "very, very weak circumstantial" evidence.

Pierre Salinger, the former ABC News correspondent and a press spokesman for President Kennedy, believed, until his death in 2004, that Iran and Syria carried out the atrocity. He alleged a cover-up by the United States and Britain.

In 2003, Ahmed Own, Libya's ambassador to the United Nations, submitted a letter to the Security Council in which Libya accepted "responsibility for the actions of its officials" regarding the bombing.

Yet the following year, Sukri Ghanem, the Libyan Prime Minister, insisted the compensation payment was the "price of peace" with the West and was simply designed to remove sanctions

Lawyers for Megrahi had launched a second appeal over his conviction – the first was unsuccessful – but it was revealed on Friday that the convicted killer has now applied to abandon this action.

His supporters are optimistic he will be freed within days because of his serious illness. The Crown Office insists the conviction is safe and that no decision on his release has yet been taken by the Scottish Justice Secretary.

Paul McBride, a QC who advises the Tory party on law and order, said the Scottish Justice Secretary should resign over his handling of the case.

Mr McBride insisted that Mr MacAskill should have recalled Parliament to discuss the matter. The QC described the manner in which Megrahi’s possible release was being discussed as “beyond shameful”.

Was Libya framed for Lockerbie bombing?

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2387.shtml

Was Libya framed for Lockerbie bombing?
By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 6, 2007

On December 21, 1988, a Pan Am plane mysteriously exploded over Scotland causing the death of 270 people from 21 countries. The tragedy provoked global outrage. In 1991, two Libyans were charged with the bombing.

In the event, only Abdulbaset Ali Mohammad Al Megrahi, a Libyan agent, was pronounced guilty by a panel of three judges, who based their decision on largely circumstantial evidence. Al Megrahi and the Libyan government have protested their innocence all along.

Nevertheless, after suffering punitive UN sanctions which froze overseas Libyan bank accounts and prevented the import of spare parts needed for the country's oil industry, Tripoli reluctantly agreed to pay $2.7 billion to victims' families ($10 million per family), on condition the pay-out would not be deemed an admission of guilt.

In February 2004, the Libyan prime minister told the BBC that his country was innocent but was forced to pay-up as a "price for peace."

Al Megrahi is currently serving a life sentence, but earlier this year the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled there may have been a miscarriage of justice on the basis of lost or destroyed evidence.

Later this month, a Scottish appeals court is due to revisit the case and is expected to overturn Al Megrahi's conviction as unsafe.

The Libyan leader's son Saif Al Islam recently said he is confident Al Megrahi will soon be found innocent and will be allowed to return home.

On Sunday, an Observer expose written by Alex Duval Smith reported "a key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake" with allegations of "international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work" levelled at "the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police."

The Observer story maintains Ulrich Lumpert, a Swiss engineer who was "a crucial witness," has now confessed that he lied about the origins of a timer switch.

Recently, Lumpert gave a sworn declaration to a Swiss court, which read "I stole a prototype MST-13 timing device" and "gave it without permission on June 22, 1989, to a person who was officially investigating the Lockerbie affair."

The owner of the company that manufactured the switch -- forced into bankruptcy after being sued by Pan Am --- says he told police early in the enquiry that the timer switch was not one his company had ever sold to Libya.

Moreover, he insists the timer switch shown to the court had been tampered with since he initially viewed it in Scotland, saying the pieces appeared to have been "carbonised" in the interim. He also says the court was so determined to prove Libya's guilt it brushed aside his evidence.

In 2005, a former Scottish police chief signed a statement alleging the CIA had planted fragments of a timer circuit board produced at trial, evidence supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent to the effect his agency "wrote the script" to ensure Libya was incriminated.

There are also allegations that clothing allegedly purchased by the bomber in Malta before it was wrapped around the bomb, was intact when discovered but by the time it reached the court it was in shreds.

Life sentence

The shopkeeper who sold the item made a statement to the effect Al Megrahi had never been a customer. Instead, he identified an Egyptian-born Palestinian, Mohammad Abu Talb, now serving a life sentence in Sweden for a synagogue bombing.

Professor Hans Koechler, appointed by the UN to be an observer at the trial, has termed its outcome "a spectacular miscarriage of justice." Koechler has repeatedly called for an independent enquiry, which, to date, the British government has refused to allow.

Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, insists "no court is likely to get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence."

Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, said, "Scottish justice obviously played a leading part in one of the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history."

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, who was earlier second-in-command of Britain's Aviation and Maritime Department from 1989 to 1992, writes about a strange incident on his website.

Murray says a colleague told him "in a deeply worried way" about an intelligence report indicating Libya was not involved in the Pan Am bombing. When he asked to see it, his colleague said it was marked for named eyes only, which Murray describes as "extremely unusual." Earlier, a CIA report that had reached a similar conclusion had been conveniently buried.

If Al Megrahi walks, as is likely, Libya will be vindicated and would presumably be able to reclaim monies paid in compensation along with its reputation.

This would also be a highly embarrassing turn of events for Britain and the US, not to mention their respective intelligence agencies, and would leave the question of who bombed Pan Am Flight 103 unanswered.

In a perfect world, Libya should also receive an apology from its accusers and should be allowed to sue for damages for all that it lost as a result of UN sanctions.

But in a world where political expediency often triumphs, the appeal has no foregone conclusion despite the exposure of dubious "evidence" and suspect "witnesses."

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.

French President Travels to Libya

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/25/ap3952877.html

Associated Press
French President Travels to Libya
By MICHEL EULER
07.25.07

TRIPOLI, Libya - French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to boost relations with long-isolated Libya as he met with the oil-rich country's leader Moammar Gadhafi on Wednesday as a reward for releasing six Bulgarian medical workers.

Libya is hoping for increased cooperation with Europe and the United States after it freed the six, who had been held for more than eight years on charges they infected children with AIDS.

The medics had twice been sentenced to death for allegedly infecting some 426 children in the coastal city of Benghazi in the late 1990s - charges that were widely denounced abroad as false. Libya commuted their sentences to life in prison and allowed them to fly to Bulgaria on Tuesday, where they received a presidential pardon.

During Sarkozy's visit, France and Libya signed wide-ranging cooperation agreements in areas including defense, health, the fight against terrorism and civilian nuclear power.

Under a deal sealed by the medics' release, the European Union agreed to a package of aid for Libya and the prospect of increased trade ties. The Europeans also said they would encourage contributions to a Libyan fund set up to compensate families of the children infected with the HIV virus.

In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she hoped to travel to Libya soon. "I know that American companies are very interested in working in Libya," Rice also said.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said his country might write off the $54 million debt owed to it by Libya - although he underlined that it was a humanitarian gesture that should not be seen as "paying ransom, or admitting (the medics') guilt."

Libya reacted to the pardon Wednesday, summoning Bulgaria's top diplomat to the foreign ministry to deliver a note of protest. "The release is in violation of agreements ... between the two countries," the note said, demanding an official explanation.

That protest came hours after the organization representing the children's families denounced the Bulgarian decision.

Sarkozy's visit had been contingent on the release of the medics, whose freedom he had made a foreign policy priority since taking office in May.

The EU has been negotiating with Tripoli for months, trying to find a resolution to the crisis. French first lady Cecilia Sarkozy made two trips to Libya this month to push for the medics' release; on Tuesday, she scored the coup of flying them home to Bulgaria aboard a French presidential plane.

France and Libya "affirm their desire to give new momentum to bilateral relations, and to build a strategic partnership between the two countries," the leaders said in a joint statement.

The countries agreed to boost cooperation on areas including fighting terrorism, research, education, the economy and migration, the statement said. They urged stability in Sudan and Chad and "underlined the need to work together to resolve armed conflicts on the African continent."

One agreement touched on defense cooperation, and in another memo, leaders pledged to work together on "peaceful applications for nuclear energy," the statement said. The issue is sensitive, and French anti-nuclear group Sortir du Nucleaire accused Sarkozy of handing over nuclear technology to the Libyans in exchange for the nurses.

Bulgaria's pardon of the medical workers brought an angry denunciation from the Libyan organization representing the children's families.

"We deeply condemn and are deeply disappointed at the absurdity and disrespect shown by the Bulgarian presidential pardon," the association said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press. It called on Interpol to have police arrest the medics again in Bulgaria, "so that they can spend the rest of their sentences in prison."

But the association avoided any mention of Gadhafi's decision to allow the medics to return to Bulgaria.

The medical workers denied infecting the children and said their confessions were extracted under torture. During their trials, international experts testified that the infections were caused by unclean conditions at the hospitals where they were treated.

Three medics, meanwhile, said at a news conference in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia that they would testify against the Libyan officers alleged to have tortured them.

"We can forgive, but we cannot forget what has happened to us," said Nasya Nenova, one of the nurses.

Nenova, Kristiana Valcheva and Ashraf al Hazouz said they were ready to testify against 11 Libyan police officers in a Bulgarian probe of the alleged torture.

If convicted, the accused will face up to 10 years in prison.

The Libyans will be investigated for allegedly using coercion, torture and threats to extract the false confessions from the medics, prosecutor Nikolai Kokinov said.

Libyan officials contend that with the medics' release, the country's slate with the outside world is clean.

In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, and agreed to pay restitution to the victims. Gadhafi also said he was dismantling his nuclear weapons program, bringing a major breakthrough in U.S.-Libyan ties. The steps brought a lifting of U.S. and European sanctions.

Since then, international investment has increased in Libya's oil sector - its only considerable industry, providing most of its gross domestic product of nearly $75 billion.

Sarkozy's trip follows a visit in May by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who also worked toward the medics' release.

In July, President Bush nominated an ambassador to Tripoli, where the U.S. reopened its embassy in May 2006.

But Libya's failure so far to pay the last portion of the $270 million it promised to families of the Lockerbie victims could hold up a greater warming of ties with the U.S. Some senators are moving to block upgrading of the embassy until all reparations are paid.

While the EU appears ready to increase ties to some extent with Libya, an even closer relationship depends on political reforms that many doubt Gadhafi is ready to carry out.