Lockerbie appeal. Lack of media interest.

[Magda Hassan]

CIA Involvement: Police chief: Lockerbie evidence was faked
CIA planted tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people

by Marcello Mega


. Global Research, August 25, 2009
The Scotsman - 2006-08-28


This report was published by the Scotesman exactly three years ago. "the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people."


A former Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.
The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.
The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.
The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.
Last night, George Esson, who was Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway when Megrahi was indicted for mass murder, confirmed he was aware of the development.
But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer's motives. He said: "Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I can't help but question their motive for raising the matter now."
Other important questions remain unanswered, such as how the officer learned of the alleged conspiracy and whether he was directly involved in the inquiry. But sources close to Megrahi's legal team believe they may have finally discovered the evidence that could demolish the case against him.
An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer approached them after Megrahi's appeal - before a bench of five Scottish judges - was dismissed in 2002.
The insider said: "He said he believed he had crucial information. A meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been planted by US agents.
"Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he'd been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified.
"He also said that at the time he became aware of the matter, no one really believed there would ever be a trial. When it did come about, he believed both accused would be acquitted. When Megrahi was convicted, he told himself he'd be cleared at appeal."
The source added: "When that also failed, he explained he felt he had to come forward.
"He has confirmed that parts of the case were fabricated and that evidence was planted. At first he requested anonymity, but has backed down and will be identified if and when the case returns to the appeal court."
The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.
The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives, and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to Libya and the East German Stasi. At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's headquarters.
The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi - to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of scientific qualifications.
Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.
The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a wild conspiracy theory. It has long been rumoured the fragment was planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.
The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.
Following the trial, legal observers from around the world, including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland. Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.
A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.
"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a manufactured case, mistakes were made."
Dr Jim Swire, who has publicly expressed his belief in Megrahi's innocence, said it was quite right that all relevant information now be put to the SCCRC.
Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity, said last night: "I am aware that there have been doubts about how some of the evidence in the case came to be presented in court.
"It is in all our interests that areas of doubt are thoroughly examined."
A spokeswoman for the Crown Office said: "As this case is currently being examined by the SCCRC, it would be inappropriate to comment."
No one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland was available to comment http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=18...rmat=print
Related Global Research Articles on Lockerbie
Lockerbie Investigator Disputes Story
Was Libya Framed for Lockerbie Bombing?
Lockerbie and Kafka's Labyrinth


[URL="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14873"]http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14908
[/URL]

[Magda Hassan]

Private Eye's Special Report: Lockerbie - Flight from Justice

[Peter Lemkin]

There were MANY other CIA and US Intelligence connections to the flight including a CIA man onboard; $500,000 in cash in his baggage and more.....I'll try to find and post....the whole 'offical version' [like most all] is a fairy tale. Are we lied to? The real question is are we EVER told the truth>?!

[Magda Hassan]

MI6 agent joined disgraced BP boss in secret meetings with Gaddafi


By Glen Owen
Last updated at 8:44 AM on 30th August 2009
New questions about the extent of the Government’s involvement in the trade deals that led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, were raised last night with the revelation that an MI6 agent flew to Libya with former BP boss Lord Browne for two cloak-and-dagger meetings with Colonel Gaddafi.

Jeff Chevalier, the ex-lover of Lord Browne, has told The Mail on Sunday that Browne was ‘shocked’ when the agent made a reference to his relationship with Mr Chevalier, indicating the authorities knew about their liaison, which was a closely guarded secret.





Negotiations: Lord Browne, former BP chief, and Colonel Gaddafi, who kept the peer waiting for 24 hours in the desert


Mr Chevalier said Lord Browne also referred to Mark Allen, the MI6 counter-terrorism chief at the centre of the secret talks between Libya and Britain, who now works for BP.

But he did not know if Allen was the agent who accompanied the peer to Libya.

Lord Browne’s secret missions started shortly after international sanctions were lifted on Libya in 2003, prompting an ‘oil rush’ by companies keen to win lucrative contracts – and with the Government lobbying hard on BP’s behalf.

Although Gaddafi agreed to hand over Megrahi for trial as part of negotiations to lift sanctions, oil industry insiders claim BP’s attempts to win business were hampered by objections to the Lockerbie bomber’s detention.

Mr Chevalier, who spent four years in a relationship with Lord Browne, recalled that the BP boss made his first trip to Libya accompanied by the unnamed MI6 agent.

The 2004 trip was so secret that the landing strip where Lord Browne touched down was not recognised by navigation equipment as an airport.


More...

• Peter Mandelson's PR friend opens an office in Libya
  
• Jack Straw dropped plan to include Lockerbie bomber in prisoner transfer agreement 'because of oil deal with Libya'
  

Mr Chevalier said: ‘He spoke clearly and in detail about it. John [Lord Browne] said he had been taken aback at the amount of information the agent knew about him.

‘The MI6 man, or ex-MI6 man – I got the impression he might have recently left the service – began by asking, “So how are Jeff’s studies coming along?”, an attempt to let John know how much they knew.

John’s personal life was not so personal to the intelligence services.

‘On the way over, the pilots insisted the co-ordinates did not indicate an airport but sure enough they found a landing strip in the middle of nowhere.’
Mr Chevalier also recalled how Lord Browne had been furious that Gaddafi had kept him waiting for 24 hours.

‘John called me, fuming about the wait and threatening to leave in protest,’ he said.

‘But finally a convoy of vehicles equipped with female Bulgarian soldiers – I never understood why – came.’

Mr Chevalier said Lord Browne had spoken to Gaddafi in ‘broad terms’ about a contract to exploit Libyan oil fields, and had followed it up with a second visit within 12 months.

The negotiations led to a £54million deal being signed in 2007, BP’s first in the country since the Libyan oil industry was nationalised in 1974.

The detente process between the UK and Libya had started in 2003 after Gaddafi secretly passed a letter to Downing Street indicating he wanted to end Libya’s status as a pariah nation.

Discussions then followed between Gaddafi’s son Saif and Allen, then head of counter-terrorism at MI6.

Sir Mark Allen, as he has since become, is now a senior executive with BP.

Lord Browne was forced to resign from BP after he admitted lying to the High Court about his relationship with Mr Chevalier during an unsuccessful attempt to gag a Mail on Sunday investigation into his business activities.

[Peter Presland]

MI6 agent joined disgraced BP boss in secret meetings with Gaddafi


By Glen Owen
Last updated at 8:44 AM on 30th August 2009
New questions about the extent of the Government’s involvement in the trade deals that led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, were raised last night with the revelation that an MI6 agent flew to Libya with former BP boss Lord Browne for two cloak-and-dagger meetings with Colonel Gaddafi. .... etc

Magda - all

The papers are chock full of stuff along these lines over here at the moment. What jumps out at me though is what is NOT being said.

Everyone is getting their knicks in a twist over government complicity in a deal to free a wicked mass murderer in exchange for lucrative commercial contracts. I have no doubt about the significance of those prospective contracts but what is going completely unremarked is the certainty that Megrahi would NOT be found guilty were the case to be retried with the inclusion of new evidence his defence team have put in the public domain let alone if, in addition, the authorities were to release other information demanded by them.

The effect right now is for the government to be discredited over an outrageous decision. The fact that Mandelson is a dyed-in-the-wool MI6 man points to deep CIA involvement in what IS being said, with all the opposition parties jumping on the bandwagon and the really important issue being totally ignored. Seems to me that there is a major diversionary operation going on here.

[Helen Reyes]

major diversion, agreed.

the sanctions then the trial were meant to drag this out forever until everyone had forgotten about the discrepancies in the official tale of lockerbie. thatcher and bush had made a deal to attack iraq, and bush was interested in dealing with syria's assad directly for his heroin instead of going through middlemen in lebanon. more ominously, the scottish police would not stop investigating this as a murder and would've eventually got to the bottom of it. then there was the civil war in america between bush's shadow government people and institutions with a more democratic tradition behind them. sanctions put all this on the back burner so things could settle down, and the scots could be placated with talk of their fine jurisprudence etc.

[Peter Presland]

I meant to post earlier about the juxtaposition of synthetic US outrage at the release of Al Megrahi and bland factual reports of one Lt William Calley's apology for his part in the Mai Lai massacre some 40 years ago. I know Peter L referred to it but, This article by Nick Turse at 'Toms Dispatch' does a pretty comprehensive job on the subject. This is just part of the intro but the rest is well worth reading too:

On this one-way planet of ours, it's hard sometimes to imagine things any other way, but for a moment let's try. Imagine, for instance, that in recent years the director of Iranian intelligence oversaw a program of "extraordinary rendition" aimed at those who were believed to be prepared to commit acts of terror against that country's fundamentalist regime. Practically speaking, what this often meant was kidnapping suspects -- some quite innocent of such aims -- off the streets of Middle Eastern or South Asian cities and transporting them secretly to Iran, to "black sites" set up abroad, or to allied regimes known for their torture practices.
Imagine that these suspects, once in the hands of his agents -- the Geneva Conventions having been declared not applicable to them -- were then tortured, abused, and sometimes murdered. Imagine that, for this, the director, in a public ceremony with great hoopla, was awarded the Ayatollah Khomeini Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the land, and on retiring honorably wrote a bestselling memoir about his years in office. Imagine as well that, to help Iranian interrogators, lawyers close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had rewritten the law so that acts which the world had long agreed to be torture were now redefined as not so, and on that basis, they were instructed to do such things as waterboarding suspects, even as the fundamentalist regime regularly announced that, on the basis of its own definitions, it did not condone torture.
If such a scenario had occurred, we know what we would think of such people. We know what our media would say about such people. We know what we would demand as a fate for such people -- that they be brought to justice. The present regime in Iran has proven itself quite capable of committing its own set of horrors and tortures. The above description, however, could not be mistaken for the recent history of any agency but the CIA and associated outfits under the purview of the top officials and lawyers of the Bush administration. Indeed, George Tenet, CIA director from 1997-2004, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor possible, by George W. Bush in December 2004, when much of the above was already on the public record (and the president certainly knew far more). Tenet did then write At the Center of the Storm, a bestselling memoir, and so on.

My only real problem with the whole piece is that Colin Powell doesn't get a mention.

[Peter Lemkin]

http://takingaimradio.com/m3u/takingaim090825.m3u

[Peter Lemkin]

Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed

3 Sept 2009

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the suppression of facts behind the furore over the "compassionate" release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. He writes that Megrahi was "in effect blackmailed by the governments of Scotland and England" so that it would not be revealed in his appeal that he had been framed for a crime he did not commit.

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”. (Lockerbie – the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from the Private Eye website 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”.

Peversely, 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 op en 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 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, Dr Graham Forbes, “that 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 missing entirely 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.

[David Guyatt]

I recall a special TV programme on (I think) BBC telly well over a decade ago now that broadcast an interview of the ex-Iranian Prime Minister/President in power at the time of Lockerbie who openly admitted having paid for the shooting down of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of the Iranian airliner by the US Vincennes.

The question, I suppose, is how something so public admitted can be so readily overlooked.