Libya and Pan Am flight Lockerbie

[Peter Lemkin]

The Anti-Empire Report

September 2nd, 2009
by William Blum
http://www.killinghope.org
"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.
Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are "socialist". (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with "Socialism" in large letters, as the only word.8) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol' capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don't really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled "The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?"

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can't do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs. 9 Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.
The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

"But we must never forget," said President Obama recently, "this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people." 10

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It's simple — We're fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We're fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to "plotting to do so again" ... there's no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn't have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn't even have to be such a thing as a "member of al Qaeda". It tells us nothing that some of them can be called "al Qaeda". Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only "necessity" that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can't be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.
The revolution was televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
Because the revolution will not be televised. ...

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news
The revolution will not be right back after a message
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron's song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as '60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called "revolution".

Fast Forward to 2009 ... Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution. 11

Oh? So that's it? That's what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn't have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.
Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.
– David Gibbs, "First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia"

There's no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs' new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

Notes
Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009 ↩
Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992 ↩
Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009 ↩
"Opinion of the Court", Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001 ↩
Read many further details about the case at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm ↩
The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009 ↩
Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009 ↩
Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2 ↩
Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned ↩
Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009 ↩
Washington Post, August 26, 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
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org

[Helen Reyes]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

[Paul Rigby]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

I'm sympathetic - please expand.

Paul

[Charles Drago]

Helen is correct.

No time now, but I'll chime in later.

Suffice to say that we can NEVER understand our history until we overcome our natural tendencies to see institutions -- not to mention individuals -- as monolithic constructs.

[David Guyatt]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

I'm sympathetic - please expand.

Paul

Yes, please expand Helen, I'm curious also.

Do your thoughts centre around Major Tiny McKee and his DIA team?

[Peter Presland]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

I'm inclined to agree with Helen on this too.

Of the three broad scenarios in circulation the Libya/Megrahi one is the least likely. In fact a fairy transparent stitch-up would be more accurate.

I'm torn between Blum's widely held 'Iran financed the PFLP-GC' theory and the CIA Drugs related internal feud one, with the latter having the edge IMHO.

Charle's point about our tendency to see institutions as monolithic structures is important because, as often as not, it's result is to hide the obvious 'in plane sight'

There's a fairly comprehensive summary of that case here.

[Myra Bronstein]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

I'm inclined to agree with Helen on this too.

Of the three broad scenarios in circulation the Libya/Megrahi one is the least likely. In fact a fairy transparent stitch-up would be more accurate.

I'm torn between Blum's widely held 'Iran financed the PFLP-GC' theory and the CIA Drugs related internal feud one, with the latter having the edge IMHO.

Charle's point about our tendency to see institutions as monolithic structures is important because, as often as not, it's result is to hide the obvious 'in plane sight'

There's a fairly comprehensive summary of that case here.

That is fascinating Peter. Thanks for the link. I had no idea...

[Myra Bronstein]

...
Suffice to say that we can NEVER understand our history until we overcome our natural tendencies to see institutions -- not to mention individuals -- as monolithic constructs.

This is an important point. I'm still, unsuccessfully, trying to overcome that tendency.

[Helen Reyes]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

I'm sympathetic - please expand.

Paul

I don't have any Sherlock Holmes' the-dog-didn't-bark deep insight or access to any classified information, but here goes.

The Libyan theory falls apart immediately. It's based on eye-witness testimony from a Maltese who gave conflicting accounts, and on the presence of some clothes supposedly from his shop supposedly found at the crash site. The Libyan timers from Switzerland was evidence inserted into the crime scene and even then wasn't conclusively demonstrated.

The Iranian theory hinges on unsourced intelligence purposely leaked to four journalists about a David Lovejoy contacting Iranian embassy Beirut about the presence of a team on flight 107 out of Frankfurt, plus unsourced intelligence that the Ayatollah had offered compensation to those avenging the shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf by US forces. One journalist claimed to have heard the recording of the phone call, but that can and is faked a lot, witness the intercept of Libyan traffic on the Berlin disco planted by Israel. Why were these journalists provided this, and by whom?

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command in Germany theory, part of the Iranian theory, is based on the presence of a Toshiba tape recorder, radio or boombox fitted with moulded Semtex. I have not seen any evidence there was any such thing on Lockerbie, although Scottish police would know better than I. What it looks like is an attempt to tell the German Federal Criminal Service what they wanted to hear, that the PFLP-GC ring they had partially busted up just prior to Lockerbie with such bombs found in their safe houses or depots, was connected.

Consider the scenario hinted at in Juval Aviv's Interfor report, that there was a team of investigators/agents sent to Beirut to look at how to free the hostages held there, that such a team stumbled onto a US intelligence operation about which they hadn't known previously, that horrified at what was going on they immediately departed for Washington to give report.

This team would not have been CIA. According to a note discovered in McKee's (whoever he was, if that was his name, but most likely DIA), they would have been three DIA people, FBI and Naval intelligence, by my guess. The note contained codenames.

There would be 5 of them. Two CIA agents would also be on the flight, chasing them back to Washington to keep a lid on it. There would be Jaffar, the courier carrying Lebanese heroin to Detroit.

Immediately after the crash, CIA did arrive on the scene and took control, selecting sectors were native searchers were not to tread. This would be with MI5 and/or Home Office support. What were they looking for?

1. the drugs
2. a large amount of money, possibly counterfeit US currency printed on plates left in the Shah's Iran, possibly including a large sum in traveller's cheques.
3. corpses of agents who wouldn't feature on the list of dead
4. papers on the pilot

Why were they looking for papers on the pilot? It makes sense if he had a written manifest to present in NY or Detroit and was part of the rogue deliveries.

This brings up something missing from the accounts I've seen. CIA, DEA and BKA (German criminal police) were apparently running drugs through Frankfurt-am-Main flughafen, but the drugs were coming from Nicosia, Cyprus, through the DEA and front companies there. Supposedly a switcheroo took place using baggage handlers for Pan Am. These people are usually described as Turkish, but the people loading Lockerbie 107 included a German with an Irish last name, a Brit or American and someone who seems to have a Kurdish name. The thing that's missing is how the drugs got from Nicosia to Frankfurt. The fact seems to be the CIA and/or DEA had front companies run by Lebanese in Rome, and the drugs probably went through to Rome in all manners, by ship, by air and via Athens. The other missing element is how the drugs got off-loaded in the US. The destinations would be NYC, Chicago, Detroit and LA. There had to be Customs agents included in the operation. If that's so, it's not hard to consider some pilots were also party.

Would a rogue element or group of CIA blow up 272 people, including 2 of their own, to protect the route?

Consider what was at stake for them in Nicosia and Frankfurt, and Beirut.

Nicosia wasn't just buying heroin from Lebanon, they were a major center for shipping PROMIS to points east. The PROMIS version with the NSA backdoor for intelligence collection.

Nicosia/Beirut was part of a two-way route for drugs. Ca. 1985 Pat Robertson, the televangelist from the 700 Club and major nexus in allying the Little People in America with extremist right-wing Zionism in America and Israel, set up MET, Middle East Television, with HQ in Beirut, in the middle of a civil war. Robertson's "network" provided logistics for delivering raw cocaine to Lebanese/Syrian interests who wanted to branch out into new drugs. In exchange they were sending weapons out for the Contras in Nicaragua. This was also the conduit for arms to Iran.

Frankfurt flughafen was part of an operation to intercept Eastern bloc shipments as well.

"Useful idiot" colonel Oliver North was part of the lower level of a team that was shipping drugs from Latin America and the Levant into the US and shipping weapons to allies and nominal enemies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran and most likely Afghanistan. The rpofits were laundered through BCCI. This is what the Christic Institute called The Secret Team after the Iran/Contra scandal partially broke. The drug money was also laundered through American savings and loan banks, some of them facades created for that purpose.

Outside Indio, California Wackenhut had its secret base on the Indian reservation and was acquiring weapons including night vision scopes mounted on machine guns produced by Litton Industries. This is where they re-engineered PROMIS with the backdoor for surveillance. Danny Casolaro probably lost his life because he realized Lockerbie, Iran/Contra and Indio were intimately linked, and he knew the names of the players, some of them veterans from the Allende overthrow operation in Chile.

Was that enough to kill 272 people? Probably. But wait, there's more.

What the 5-man team dispatched to Beirut probably found was that the hostages were being kept at the behest of the Secret Team, the Shadow Government run by Bush under the guise of the Anti-Terrorism Task Force. One team is sent to release them, but discovers an earlier team already deployed to keep them hostage.

Why? For money, most likely. Just as the Indio operation double-billed for 800-dollar toilet seats every chance they got, so the Team in Lebanon/Cyprus or wherever would get a ransom or two and a continuing pretext for their continued operation, and associated outlays, and continuation of their clandestine routes and cargos.

October Surprise was about taking and keeping Americans hostage in Tehran, not about releasing them.

Thatcher, Bush and Reagan met in 1978 to plan the downfall of Carter and the Democrats who were doing terrible things to their secret agencies. Khomeini was supported to power by the US, by operatives working for the secret team or shadow government. They got him across borders, they staged riots, they placed media items with predicted results in the Iranian press. The initial deal was cut in North Africa, probably using Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezrinski as a "back channel" to convince the Islamic revolutionaries that the team was for real (Webster Tarpley thinks Zbig betrayed Carter here, I'm not sure), and including Bob Gates, who went on to become DCI and now DoD chief. The danger was that the theocracy was seeking to release the American embassy hostages despite the best-laid plans of the Secret Team and things had to be renegotiated with some of the reps of the power structures in Persia. That is what the Paris talks between Bush and whomever were, recorded by French surete. They needed a continuation of the "crisis" to really make sure Carter was screwed in elections. Ambassador Sullivan's (former DCI Richard Helms was previous US ambassador to Iran) trusted Iranian guard was the agent of making sure. The Iranian side probably included Mohammed Hussein Beheshti, Ibrahim Yazdi and, tangentially, the young Mousavi, the loser in the last presidential elections representing the disenfranchised upper class of upscale north Tehran, as Tarpley jokes.

A very good summary of how the Iranian hostage crisis was orchestrated by Fara Mansoor used to exist at a website archive that seems to have scrubbed it within the last few months, although an earlier piece that tells most of the tale is still hosted there, http://dmc.members.sonic.net/sentinel/1earth2.html

What I'm also saying is the Iranians could have worked with their CIA/Secret Team allies to stop the investigating team from returning to Washington. In that light, the following contraindication is reconciled with my feeling the CIA did it to the CIA:

"If Lester Coleman's hopes are realized, the result of Pan Am's appeal may also persuade the octopus to leave him in peace at last, although, having gone to ground again in the face of Washington's vendetta, he now believes there is probably more to it than meets the eye. Since his story is now supported by no less an authority than Major Khalil Tunayb, a former chief of intelligence for the PFLP-GC, there would seem little point in continuing to harry him so relentlessly unless there were some wider reason.

"(During the winter of 1992-1993, Tunayb surfaced in the media to confirm that Khalid Nazir Jafaar had been affiliated with Muslim fundamentalists in Lebanon and Detroit who knew he was working in drug operations for the DEA and CIA. According to Tunayb, Jafaar was used by the PFLP-GC as an unwitting accomplice to get the bomb bag aboard Flight 103 and had been escorted from Beirut by two equally unwitting American agents. Significantly, Tunayb's story supports much of the intelligence data provided in Juval Aviv's original Interfor Report.)"

from Trail of the Octupus by Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman
http://www.naderlibrary.com/trail.toc.htm

PFLP-GC could've carried out instructions originating ultimately with Iranian allies in the Secret Team.

Former DIA agent Coleman doesn't seem to realize that some of the "journalists" he encountered in Cyprus were agents for the secret team. These include Michael Schafer aka Michael Franks aka David Lovejoy who arrived as part of Pat Robertson and Oliver North's operation in Beirut, probably hailing from North's Georgia state freaks gallery. Another was Ron Martz, allegedly the guy who wrongly fingered security guard Richard Jewell as the nail-bomber of the Atlanta Olympics. Maetz has a history of making false accusations and generally spreading disinformation. Lloyd Burchette, Jr., was another low-level North mercenary flunkie. Finally, Coleman failed to see Michael Hurley was not just a DEA agent assigned to Nicosia, Cyprus, he was part of a much larger operation, it seems, in charge of the PROMIS distro, counterfeit money, weapons and drugs procurement. Hurley seems to have been the one to finger Coleman as the leak early in the Lockerbie aftermath, probably to cover for one of his own people who spilled some of the beans. He was duly exiled to Puyallup, Washington as a DEA field agent after some time had passed and things had cooled off a little. Martz and Burchette went on to Afghanistan with Hurley's help.

Given what was going on at the nether-end of the Iran/Contra pipelie--Contra defectors being bombed at press conferences--I don't think they had a lot of compunction about blowing up flight 107. It fits the zeitgeist, the general picture for those years, and prefigures the use of Islamic militant types in false-flag operations later on US soil.

I probably left a lot out and made a lot of mistakes. Please correct any errors. With what I think I know, I find the argument Bush didn't want to alienate Iran in the run-up to the Gulf War and so moved the blame to Libya unbelievable.

please compare

http://www.beyond-the-illusion.com/files...solaro.txt

and

"On 3 August 1991, not long after the family had moved into the refugee compound on the outskirts of Trollhattan, Coleman took a telephone call from Danny Casolaro, an American freelance journalist in Washington, who had tracked him down after reading his affidavit in the Inslaw case.

"He was working on a complex story about the octopus, Casolaro explained, linking the theft and unauthorized sale of PROMIS software to foreign governments with the BCCI scandal, the Iran/Contra affair and other questionable activities, including the so-called 'October Surprise'. Could Coleman perhaps help him with any of this? Did he know of anyone who might have further information?

"Though disturbed that Casolaro should have traced him so easily, Coleman saw the chance of a trade-off. He had been trying to find James McCloskey, the quickie divorce lawyer who had recruited him into the DIA and who might again be prepared to speak up for him, but his amiable guru had apparently abandoned his practice and moved away from Timonium, Maryland, without leaving a forwarding address. When Coleman explained this to his caller, touching on McCloskey's links with the BCCI and the intelligence community, Casolaro thanked him for the tip and promised in return to let Coleman know as soon as he ran McCloskey to earth.

"Nine days later, Ernest Fitzgerald, Coleman's friend at the Pentagon, called to say that Danny Casolaro had been found dead in a blood-boltered hotel bathroom in Martinsburg, West Virginia, both arms slashed open 12 times with a DIY knife blade. His briefcase was missing, and among other suspicious circumstances, the Martinsburg police, declaring Casolaro a suicide, had allowed the body to be embalmed before his family was even notified of his death. A firm of contract cleaners had also been called in to scour the room from top to bottom, so that any meaningful forensic investigation was impossible.

"According to relatives and friends, Casolaro had gone to West Virginia, despite recent death threats, to see somebody he had met there who, he thought, could supply the missing links in the story he was working on. Everybody who knew Casolaro, including the Hamiltons and their counsel, Elliot Richardson, were convinced he had been murdered to shut him up.

"Coleman was chilled by the news. If the person Casolaro had gone to see was McCloskey, then Coleman had sent Casolaro to his death. And if Casolaro had been killed because of what he knew, then Coleman's own chances of survival, if he fell into the same hands, looked slim. Thankful that he and Mary-Claude had decided to get out when they did, he prevailed on Fitzgerald to make further inquiries, although he found it hard to believe that the McCloskey he remembered could be involved in the murder.

"The result was even more unsettling. The likelihood that Casolaro had gone to meet McCloskey increased when investigators established that, after leaving Timonium, McCloskey had bought a horse farm at Shepardstown, about fifteen minutes down the road from where Casolaro was murdered. As against that, McCloskey had not been seen in the area for two years, although there was a working telephone number listed in his name.

"When Coleman dialed that number from Sweden, he got through to the Shenandoah Women's Center in Martinsburg, which claimed never to have heard of McCloskey. Efforts to trace him were then redoubled, but without result, and, as far as Coleman knows, McCloskey is still missing to this day.

"On 16 October 1991, Coleman telephoned Elliot Richardson to pass on the results of these inquiries, but, as Richardson was out of the country, he spoke instead to William Hamilton, president of Inslaw, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

"His revelations came as no great surprise. Hamilton himself had received 'threats of bodily harm from former US and Israeli covert intelligence operatives' embarrassed by his efforts to unmask the government's theft of Inslaw's software."

at

http://www.naderlibrary.com/trail.ch.17.htm

[Myra Bronstein]

I think Blum's wrong. It wasn't Iran. It was CIA vs CIA.

I'm sympathetic - please expand.

Paul

I don't have any Sherlock Holmes' the-dog-didn't-bark deep insight or access to any classified information, but here goes....[url=http://www.naderlibrary.com/trail.ch.17.htm][/url]

Fascinating stuff Helen. Thanks for the explanation.
...
Pat Robertson!?