Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and Pan Am flight 103 contrasted

[The following are excerpts from a long report published today on the World Socialist Web Site:]

The Dutch Safety Board’s (DSB’s) preliminary report into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) is being portrayed by imperialist governments and their media spokesmen as confirmation that anti-Kiev rebels in eastern Ukraine shot the plane down with a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile.

While claims of indirect Russian responsibility for the destruction of MH17 are at the heart of the US-NATO propaganda over Ukraine, the report says nothing of the sort. In fact, it does not even state that the aircraft was shot down. MH17 crashed on July 17, in the war zone of eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers and crew members lost their lives.

The DSB’s report states that, in accordance with the stated “sole objective” of “the prevention of similar accidents and incidents,” it does not “apportion blame or liability in respect of any party”—something that the capitalist media downplays or ignores.

The only basis on which the media can again repeat their assertions that pro-Russian separatists were responsible is the report’s statement that “The damage observed in the forward section of the aircraft appears to indicate that the aircraft was penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects from outside the aircraft” (emphasis added).

But the report never once identifies what it means by “high-energy objects.” It also claims that, even though enough of the wreckage was recovered to confirm that the aircraft appears to have been particularly badly hit above the level of the cockpit floor, DSB investigators supposedly failed to recover or study any of the objects that penetrated the plane.

The report as issued is equally compatible with radar and satellite data presented July 21 by the Russian military, indicating that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet was in the immediate vicinity and ascending towards MH17 as it was shot down. Missiles and machinegun rounds fired by an SU-25 are also “high-energy objects.” This possibility has not been addressed, let alone refuted by Kiev, Washington or anyone else involved in the investigation.

On August 9 [RB: the correct date is August 7], the Malaysian New Straits Times published an article effectively charging the Kiev regime with shooting down MH17. It stated that evidence from the crash site indicated that the plane was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter with a missile followed by heavy machine gun fire. The report was subsequently ignored by the world’s media. (...)

The DSB does not address the absence of any satellite imagery or radar data, or any other evidence supplied by US intelligence agencies, which operate the most powerful global surveillance network. It is implausible, to say the least, to imagine that Washington’s vast apparatus was paying no attention to the war zone of eastern Ukraine, which is also a regular flight path for many commercial airline flights. (...)

In sharp contrast, following the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, photographs of the area taken by a French satellite were delivered to the investigators within hours. The US Department of Defence and NASA also provided the investigation with high-resolution photographs from spy satellites.

Despite Russia continually requesting that the US administration supply the investigation with the images and data it obviously possesses relating to the MH17 crash, it has refused to do so.

[Further posts on this blog about MH17 as compared with, or contrasted to, Pan Am 103 can be found here.]

Recruitment of the FBI's Lockerbie "golden informant"

[What follows is taken from an article headed Richard Marquise and his "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka - An Extract from "Enemies - A History of the FBI" by Tim Weiner posted yesterday on baz’s blog The Masonic Verses:]

Tim Weiner's recent book Enemies - A History of the FBI is a fascinating story of the creation of the FBI within the US Justice Department following American entry into the Great War, not for the purpose of criminal investigation but to counter the threat of radicals, anarchists and communists by means of dubious constitutionality. (...)

The author devotes six pages to an uncritical account of the Bureau's involvement in the Lockerbie case focusing on the role of the leader of the FBI taskforce (of 7 persons) Richard Marquise. (Tom Thurman is not mentioned.)

Marquise was recently quoted in the Dutch media in a story titled "The Lessons of Lockerbie" in relation to the shooting down of flight MH17 over the Ukraine. Marquise advocated the recruitment of a "Golden Informant" to solve the case just as he had done in the Lockerbie case (and by ignoring the actual evidence). Weiner's book gives a very interesting summary of how this "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka was recruited (page 372).

"Marquise needed to turn intelligence into evidence.  He needed a witness who would link Megrahi to the Samsonite suitcase with the Semtex.  He needed to find someone who knew that the suitcase carried the bomb from Air Malta to Pan Am 103.  He went back to the CIA. The Agency told him, belatedly, that it had once had a Libyan informant named Abdul Majid Giaka. He had gone on the CIA's payroll four months before Lockerbie. He was on it the night Pan Am 103 was bombed. But the Agency had dropped him a few months later, deeming him a fabricator milking his interrogators for money.

Marquise was dying to talk to Majid, no matter how dubious he seemed to the CIA.  In June 1991 the Agency flew him from a navy ship off the coast of Malta to give the FBI the chance to interview him in Virginia.  Justly wary of its informant, the CIA imposed one condition: don't tell anybody."  (Marquise immediately phoned Stuart Henderson.)  

"Majid was debriefed for at least two weeks during September 1991. He insisted that he knew three facts. He identified Megrahi as an intelligence officer serving as Libya's airline security chief. He said that Megrahi's subordinate in Malta had a cache of Semtex. And he said he had seen Megrahi with a large brown suitcase at the airport in Malta during the weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. Majid was without doubt an unreliable witness. But the FBI had faith that he was telling the truth on those three points. Marquise thought he had the foundation of a case that would stand up in court."

Giaka's account did stand up unchallenged before a patriotic US Grand Jury leading to the November 1991 indictment. However, it crumbled before even the Mickey Mouse Camp Zeist tribunal when in the defence team's finest hour they had admitted in evidence a large number of CIA cables regarding Giaka. What is astonishing is that Megrahi was actually convicted despite Giaka being discredited, a fact not mentioned in Mr Weiner's book.

Perhaps some of the parties to the MH17 atrocity will, (or have already) recruited their own "Golden Informant".

Marquise's wrote his own account of the Lockerbie investigation in his book Scotbom.  (Which I have never read.) Giaka of course never wrote his memoirs and has never been heard of since the close of the Camp Zeist trial.

I am afraid the only "Lesson of Lockerbie" for the families of those murdered on flight MH17 is how Governments fabricate evidence to suit their own political objectives regardless of the facts.

Forthcoming performance of Lockerbie play

[There is to be a performance of Lee Gershuny’s play Lockerbie: Lost Voices at the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock on 3 October 2014. The play was first performed, to considerable acclaim, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. The online advertisement for the forthcoming production reads as follows:]

Friday 3 October at 7:30pm in The Beacon Studio Theatre. Tickets £10 (Concessions £8)

Meet six hypothetical passengers on Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988 before and after the plane explodes over Lockerbie. A mother and her stepdaughter argue about the roots of injustice; a retired couple clash over family versus personal dreams; and a US intelligence agent tries to convince a Scottish journalist to risk her life for the “scoop of the century.” With humour, love and courage, they challenge each other to either accept the unacceptable or take a stand for their personal truth. After the explosion, they speak from the neutrality of death, witnessing and questioning events as they unfold on the ground.

Beacon Arts Centre | 01475 723723

A deafening silence

What follows is an item published on this blog on this date two years ago:

Silence for the dead of Lockerbie

[This is the heading over an article posted recently on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads as follows:]

It is now almost six months since the revelation in John Ashton's book (Megrahi: You are my Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence) that the key evidence on which Baset Al-Megrahi was convicted can no longer be scientifically sustained.

And yet there remains a deafening silence on the part of the judges and Crown Office officials responsible for the investigation and conviction of Al-Megrahi.

The two main planks on which the prosecution's case was founded are:

1. A Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, identified Al-Megrahi as the stranger who had, shortly before the December 1988 bombing, bought clothes in his shop.

2. A fragment of an electronic timer board found at Lockerbie came from a batch of twenty sold to Libya in 1985 by Swiss electronics company MEBO.

1. The Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, during their own three-year investigation of the case, found six grounds for concluding that "a miscarriage of justice may have occurred".

One of the SCCRC's grounds was their discovery of a series of entries in the police diary of chief Dumfries and Galloway police investigator Harry Bell.

Bell recorded from the first days of his investigation that huge offers of reward were available from the United States to principal identification witness Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci.

In a letter sent by Dana Biehl of the US Department of Justice, it was explained that Gauci would receive "unlimited monies, with $10,000 available immediately" if Al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bell's police diary, and all knowledge of this offer and negotiations concerning the offer, were concealed from the trial and first appeal. The judges who convicted Al-Megrahi were unaware of these matters when they concluded that Gauci was a totally reliable witness.

Gauci's final and conclusive identification of Al-Megrahi took place during a police identity parade.

Yet Gauci could not fail to identify the man, since he had possessed for several weeks a copy of a magazine with a colour photo of Al-Megrahi, in which the Libyan was described as "the bomber".

2. The fragment of electronic timer board

It was upon this item that the entire case against Al-Megrahi would turn. In the minds of the judges it proved the Libyan connection, since the evidence appeared to show that it came from a batch sold to Libya in 1985.

It had - according to the available evidence - been manufactured by Swiss company Thüring, on behalf of electronics supplier MEBO. It seemed to be a "golden thread" linking Al-Megrahi to the bomb.

In 2008 the Al-Megrahi defence team discovered an extraordinary anomaly, one which had escaped the attention of the prosecution team, the Scottish Crown Office, and the Scottish police. It concerned the silver-like protective coating on the fragment, which covered the copper circuitry in order to prevent oxidisation.

A hand-written note by the government's chief forensic scientist Alan Feraday had recorded the protective coating as "100% tin".

Feraday's records also showed that he was aware of the difference between the Lockerbie fragment and the coating upon a control sample supplied to the police as part of their investigation. The control sample - manufactured by Swiss company Thüring - contained a 70/30% alloy of tin and lead.

The prosecution and police mistake was to speculate that the heat of the Lockerbie explosion had entirely evaporated the lead content. But no follow-up investigations in order to test this theory were carried out.

During the trial, the judges and defence team were unaware of the anomaly and accepted the provenance of the fragment from the metallurgical point of view.

When in 2008 the defence team checked with Thüring, it emerged that all timer boards made by that company throughout the 1980's were coated with an alloy mixture of 70% tin and 30% lead. Indeed, Thüring had always made, and continue to make, boards with a 70/30% alloy.

In 2008 the Thüring production manager swore an affidavit to this effect and was scheduled to repeat his evidence in Al-Megrahi's second appeal, abandoned in 2009.

Having discovered the anomaly, the defence team commissioned two highly experienced and reputable scientists to investigate the matter. In a series of experiments carried out at separate laboratories, the scientists tested the theory of evaporation of lead content by high temperatures.

In all cases, the lead did not evaporate. Thus they established beyond all reasonable doubt that the fragment found at Lockerbie could not have come from any of the timers sold to Libya by MEBO.

This evidence too was scheduled to be presented in Al-Megrahi's second appeal, abandoned in 2009.

The protocols and data resulting from the defence-commissioned experiments would no doubt be freely available, should the prosecuting authorities request to examine them.

Do the responsible officers not have a duty of conscience to at least enquire into this new evidence?  

And might we ask of Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland how he would feel if it was his own daughter who had been murdered by unknown persons, while a man remains falsely convicted for that offence?

Will not his silence, and that of his officials and the Scottish judiciary, should it continue, be interpreted by historians as the greatest of betrayals of Scottish society and the law?

[RB: Today, two years and six months after the revelation in John Ashton’s book, the deafening silence continues.]

HMG and the release of Megrahi: from a UK ambassador to Libya

What follows is taken from an article by Oliver Miles, a former UK ambassador to Libya, published on this date five years ago, shortly after Megrahi’s compassionate release, in the Mail on Sunday and reproduced on this blog:

Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s acknowledgement that the prospect of trade and oil deals with Libya played a part in the Government’s handling of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi has heightened the intrigue.

One British motivation is clear: Libya, dirt poor in everything except oil and gas, has been an important energy producer for half a century. It sells £40billion of oil per year – mainly to Europe – and buys from every trading country in the world. Britain has become a major supplier.

Furthermore, Libya is that rare thing, a ‘rogue state’ which sponsored terrorism before being brought back into the international fold by diplomacy. (...)

For 15 years Libya has been slowly emerging from its status as international pariah, and dealing with London is regarded there as a staging post to its ultimate goal – the normalisation of relations with the United States.

There is also the matter of Megrahi, an important man from an influential tribe (...) Megrahi’s close family and tribal elders would have been putting pressure on the Libyan leader to do something about bringing their man home.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Libya has actively sought to deal with the international community, often using Britain as a diplomatic bridgehead to the US, which was in the past much more aggressive. It ended support for terrorism, paid compensation to victims on a vast scale and abandoned illegal programmes of weapons of mass destruction.

All this has made Libya increasingly attractive to the West. The benefits for Britain in having access to Libya’s oil, when gas supplies are subject to disruption by the Russians and nuclear plants are being decommissioned, should be obvious to anyone. (...)

Lockerbie has been central to Libya’s international rehabilitation. Under arrangements worked out in [1998] by Robin Cook and the Foreign Office, involving a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands, Megrahi was convicted of responsibility for the destruction of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in 1988 which killed 270 people.

There have always been doubts about the evidence against him. Some believe, as I do, that the Libyans delivered him for trial only because they felt he was unlikely to be convicted.

Having read the legal judgment of his trial, I defy anyone to conclude from it that his guilt was proved beyond reasonable doubt. Yet his first appeal, in 2002, was dismissed. He always insisted on his innocence and only abandoned his second appeal in the hope of a return to Libya. (...)

On his second visit, in 2007, [Tony Blair] launched a number of initiatives, including assisting the return of BP to Libya.

He also unwittingly laid the foundations for the current furore by proposing a Prisoner Transfer Agreement to allow British prisoners convicted in Libya to serve their sentences in Britain and vice versa – an arrangement which exists between many countries.

The Libyans saw it as an instrument to get Megrahi home.

But Blair seems conveniently to have overlooked the fact that Megrahi’s fate rested with the devolved government in Scotland. Given the bad relations between the Labour Party and the Scottish Nationalists, this was more than a formal problem.

Blair also overlooked an even bigger obstacle. Under the Lockerbie trial agreements, any sentence arising from it had to be served in Scotland (the Libyans insisted on this since they feared Megrahi might be handed to the Americans and executed).

The Lockerbie agreements are not properly documented, but the commitments were well known to the Foreign Office, the Americans and the Libyans. Tony Blair may not have bothered about them as he didn’t like inconvenient advice from officials.

As these difficulties emerged, the Libyans began to feel that they had been led up the garden path. And when it became known last year that Megrahi was terminally ill with prostate cancer, Tripoli began to issue not-very-veiled threats that if he died in jail relations between Britain and Libya would suffer.

When his condition deteriorated, two things happened: he inexplicably abandoned his appeal, and a story was leaked to the BBC that Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was to grant compassionate release.

The reaction in the US was fevered amid rumours of a deal involving business and oil. The Americans have taken a line which they would call robust and I would call vindictive.

Some reactions have been foolish (Obama’s suggestion that Megrahi should have been put under house arrest in Tripoli), and others outrageous.

The demand by Obama and Brown that Megrahi should not receive a ‘hero’s welcome’ was a classic example of demanding that water should run uphill.

I believe Megrahi’s release was influenced more by the Scottish government’s desire to assert its independence rather than by any deal. Others may disagree, but time will tell.

Progress is slow and there are many obstacles to a better way of life in Libya. But BP’s operations continue and Megrahi has returned home to die.

Blair, Gaddafi, Megrahi

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009:

Tony Blair and Colonel Gadaffi discussed al-Megrahi

Tony Blair discussed with Colonel Gadaffi how best to “find a way through" for the jailed Lockerbie bomber Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi after BP formally signed an exploration deal in 2007, according to Libya’s Europe minister.

In an interview with The Sunday Times in Tripoli yesterday, Abdulati al-Obeidi, the minister, said that al-Megrahi had been on the agenda during Blair’s visit that year.

“They (Blair and Gadaffi) discussed possible ways on how legally to bring al-Megrahi to Libya, whether through British or international laws or the Scottish system,” the minister said.

“At that time they were merely exchanging ideas. The idea was discussed as a title. Everyone was looking for a relationship to continue and prosper into the future and to find a way out for Abdul Baset, but nothing was agreed." (...)

The minister, Libya’s longest-serving politican, going back since 1968, said he had been asked by his government to become involved in the negotiations over al-Megrahi’s release following the prisoner’s cancer diagnosis.

It was he who first conveyed Libya’s concerns to Bill Rammell, a Foreign Office minister at the time, about the possible consequences should al-Megrahi die in prison.

“I told Rammell and then (Ivan) Lewis, his successor, that al-Megrahi was very sick with cancer and that if he died in prison it would be disastrous in general, not just with regards to trade issues, but more importantly with public opinion, as people here and in the Middle East believed he was innocent, a hero.

“If he had died in prison they would also have believed that his illness was brought about intentionally and this would have been bad.”

He said he had conveyed the same message to Scottish officials.

It was then that Rammell had told him that neither Gordon Brown, the prime minister, nor David Miliband, the foreign secretary, wanted al-Megrahi to die in prison.

Legal experts were hired to explore ways in which to seek his freedom and they were made aware of possible release on compassionate grounds as well as under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement.

The minister said al-Megrahi had insisted on dropping his appeal against conviction for the Lockerbie bombing in order to give both options a better chance.

“He was a sick man, a dying man who wanted to return home, reunite with his family and see them before he died,” he said. Al-Megrahi had declared when he made his decision: “I want to die among my family.”

[The above are excerpts from an article in The Sunday Times.]

Further information about Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, a highly significant figure in the Lockerbie saga, is to be found in blogposts here. My take on the “deal in the desert” can be read here.

"One of the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history"

[The following are excerpts from an article by Linda S Heard published seven years ago today in Gulf News and on this blog:]

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 as 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. (...)

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".