The Lockerbie Divide

Libya and Lockerbie: A Questioned Past, an Uncertain Future

2011-10-15T22:30:00.000-07:00

October 16, 2011

I've still not been blogging at this site, remaining intensively pre-occupied with more current Gaddafi crime accusations - like this and this - along the path to the destruction of the green revolution and all those who dare to fight for it. There will be far less of them in short order, judging from the siege of Sirte and now the massacres.

My two big thoughts on Lockerbie these days are:

1) It's odd how even the new government is willing to cause some friction with its European sponsors to insist the Lockerbie case is closed and no one's going to be re-tried or re-jailed. The oil is negotiable, and resistant loyalists can be slaughtered on sight, but apparently handing Mr. al-Megrahi back to the Brits or anyone else is such a sore spot that they'd better not try it.

2) With no Gaddafi regime left to hang the crime on, and Iran coming into the limelight again, along with its proxy Syria, the truth may be allowed to emerge now of the Iranian-Syrian(?)-PFLP-GCplot that actually did destroy Pan Am 103. It would be for all the wrong reasons, however - mainly to "justify" the next regime change project(s) of an increasingly bold and desperate grab for the world's oil reserves.

Anyway, on the justifications for destoying Libya this year, old and new, I have discovered a prominent ally. I recently ran across a video interview, in French, with Yves Bonnet, a French terrorism expert and former high counter-terror official. From the text summary of the September 1 interview, and what I can make out, he's explaining how Gaddafi's Libya wasn't so bad from a terrorism point of view, and didn't do Lockerbie, at least. I can make out the name Ahmed Jibril being mentioned.

Bonnet is a co-founder of CIRET-AVT (International Center for Research and Study on Terrorism and Aide to Victims of Terrorism), along with a Belgian parliamentarian and a former Algerian government minister. With this intriguing genesis, CIRET-AVT has gone on to do unusually brilliant things. Along with another group (CF2R - Center for Research on Intelligence), they wrote a rare, really good report on the Libyan Civil War and the "uncertain future" of the country after the violent, NATO-backed Islamist uprising there (see "Un Avenir Incertain" in Libya)

Unlike most who traveled to Libya on fact-finding missions, their team actually talked with Tripoli and took them seriously, allowing their report to wind up making sense. A sample, on the "popular uprising" in Az Zawiyah, near the capitol:

During three weeks, the police received written orders not to do anything against the insurgents, not to shoot, not to confront them.
[...]
During those three weeks, all the public buildings were looted, ransacked, and burnt; police stations, offices of the security department, court houses, town halls, etc. ... There were also atrocities committed (women who were raped, and some police officers who were killed), as well as civilian victims during these three weeks. . . . The victims were killed in the manner of the Algerian GIA [Armed Islamic Group]: throats cut, eyes gauged out, arms and legs cut off, sometimes the bodies were burned . . .

The old and mixed (?) record of 1980s terrorism accusations aside, there were terrorists of the al Qaeda/LIFG/GIA breed that Tripoli was clearly working against, along with Algeria, and certain Westerners willing to co-operate in the age where al Qaeda was everyone's enemy. Yet to a large extent, these same wound up being armed and covered-for by the same western powers that first used al Qaeda against Gaddafi back in 1996. Fifteen years later, Bin Laden himself was just killed but his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri is declaring a victory in Libya:

"And if I congratulated our people in Libya for their victory over the tyrant, I call upon our people in Algeria to follow their footsteps," Zawahiri said in the video. "Here are your brothers in Tunisia and then in Libya having thrown out the two tyrants to the trash can of history, so why don't you revolt against your tyrant?"

Interesting times.

Permanent Second-toTop-Post / Start Point

2011-08-31T12:00:00.000-07:00

(last real update 29 November 2010)

Welcome to “The Lockerbie Divide,” a site dedicated to addressing the mountainous divide in opinion that exists over Truth and Justice regarding the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103. Some samples of the two sides can be glimpsed in a related essay, and it should be clear they are not equal in numbers or influence, nor in accuracy. One side wins on power, the other on Truth. Obviously I’m in the latter camp, but it’s more than just hyperbole at work.
The material on this site is all written by myself unless otherwise noted. My own posts vary from empty marked (incomplete) to major essays. Some is little more than "thinking out loud" and subject to change, but much else is actually at the cutting edge of what anyone knows about the case.
The original plan for this site was to gather some of the amazing talent I'd encountered on the Internet into a powerful site for crossing and wearing down the divide. And I have gratefully accepted some amazing contributions from others:

> Dr. Jim Swire, leader of the British families of PA103 group - Comment on creation of the Lockerbie Divide
> Professor Robert Black QC, Lockerbie Trial "architect" - From Lockerbie to Zeist (via Tripoli, Tunis, and Cairo) (re-published from a book, on-line exclusive)
> Robert Forester, Justice For Megrahi campaign founding member - Circumstantial Jigsaw Puzzle, and also Justice for Megrahi Campaign (details about the group)
> Barry Walker, inspired theorist - Camp Zeist: Perils and Pitfalls of a Designer Trial
> Patrick Haseldine, former public servant - The South Africans Theory with rebuttals by myself and Robert Forrester
And then, posts by others that weren't submitted, but taken by me, with generalized permission, from other sources.
>"Rolfe," JREF forum inspired researcher/commentator
- Some Background on Karol Sikora
- Rewards and Bribery
These are now both among my most-viewed posts here. More excellence from Rolfe will be coming up (with a head's-up next time).
> Various: Richard Marquise Disputes the Findings of the Zeist Court. Awesome comments from a post at The Lockerbie Case by Richard Marquise, Rolfe, Matt Berkley, Jo G, Ben Six, Ebol (the Bolliers), Full Inquiry, and myself. Subject: the FBI SCOTBOM chief's continued promotion of the evidence of "witness" Abdul Majid Giaka.
And finally, words by many people besides me skimmed from different sources, expressing doubts (or inverse certainty) about Megrahi's guilt. Recently updated, with 84 names, no Libyans or their lawyers, no known crackpots, just several QCs, lawyers, political and religious leaders, reputable journalists, academics, and experts speaking of their doubts. A varied list including Robert Baer, Noam Chomsky, David Frum, Margaret Thatcher (sort of), and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
> No one Seriously Doubts the Libyan's Guilt?
Also, learn about the Justice for Megrahi Campaign

How this site works:
The post-dated blog format usually brings the newest post to the top, and I usually put the newest posts right beneath this. But I also reassign dates and times to bring certain articles near the top or further down. Simply scrolling the page may be confusing, especially if one is not familiar with the details of the case. The more useful organization starts here and progresses with links.

Comments and questions are encouraged wherever there's a "post a comment" type link. I offer heartfelt thanks to anyone who takes the time to read and engage this material. You’re probably here to learn something, whether you realize it or not, and I’d like to help.

The Sources
The information on this site draws from a variety of sources: official reports (PDF), books, magazine and Internet articles, opinions and commentary, digital videos, photographs, and most importantly Megrahi's second appeal paperwork (see link to the right, second from top) and the complete (?) transcripts of the 2000 trial at Camp Zeist. This is not openly available to most people, but I've been blessed with a full copy - over 10,000 inefficiently-formatted pages of people talking in great detail, for 87 days, about the evidence al Megrahi was convicted on. It's proven very useful so far in clarifying details, and will continue to offer gems to those who follow this site. Many of my sources, aside from the trial transcripts, will be gathered at the post Lockerbie Documents.

More Bite-sized
Guided tour of the case against Megrahi if you feel you're ready to look at the actual evidence.

- Images and introductions to 12 key points of the case can be found in my Lockerbie cards collection.
- And for those willing to learn but not in the mood to read, there's a page that links to numerous videos on the subject.

Anyone intrigued or infuriated or otherwise willing to give me a piece of your mind, I'm willing to accept. I can be reached by e-mail at
caustic_logic@yahoo.com

- Adam Larson aka Caustic Logic
Spokane, WA, USA

20 August 2009

2011-08-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

MacAskill’s Two-Track Railroad: part 10/10
Leaving Glasgow
20 August 2010

Note, August 20 2011: One year ago I posted this, to mark the one year anniversary of al-Megrahi's release. Two years on, he's still alive as Libya is murdered over rumors (like sniping children, "bombing his own people," etc.), and people are still mad about what Libya's "gotten away with." Anyway, this day marks another one of shame in the long and sad history of the grinding down of Libya and its people. Mr. al-Megrahi flew home permanently guilty. The events of Agust two years ago explain how. We know why. The saga starts, as I told it a year ago, on August 3. That post is below, and links carry one through the sickening process from there.

Note, Oct. 16: I just noticed again that August 20, that fatefully two-year anniversary, was the start date of the final rebel push on Tripoli that seemed to succeed in only two days. Uncanny timing, that.

<< Previous: 19 August

One year ago today Kenny MacAskill announced and enacted the decision he made the previous day - to release Abdelbaset al Megrahi to his native Libya. At midday the BBC announced:

[Megrahi] will be flown home to Tripoli from Glasgow this afternoon following an announcement by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill. ... A spokesman for the administration insisted the decision had been reached "on the basis of clear evidence and on no other factors.

The promised appeearance came across the airwaves an hour later, at 1300 BST, from the Scottish Government's ministerial headquarters in Edinburgh. MacAskill was in top form, explaining the decision with flourishes like "compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs that we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as a people..." It droned on for a bit.

Another BBC story later in the day explained what came next:

A police convoy left Greenock Prison, where Megrahi was serving his sentence, just an hour after the announcement of his release was made.

It was greeting by angry jeers from a small group of local residents.

Megrahi was taken to Glasgow Airport where he boarded an Afriqiyah Airways Airbus plane bound for Tripoli, wearing a white track suit and clutching his prison release papers.

With a white scarf across his face to protect from infection, Megrahi labored up the ramp, looking like a human white flag of surrender flapping in the breeze. The colorful Libyan jet took off at 1530 BST, just two-and-a-half hours after MacAskill first opened his mouth to explain. It muscled up into the sky, away from Glasgow, and banked south towards home.

That was hardly the end of the story, but it is the end of this series of articles.

3 August 2009

2011-08-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

MacAskill’s Two-Track Railroad: part 1/10
3 August 2010

Note: The posts in this series are not conclusive, but rather what I was able to learn before the anniversary arrived, sporadically updated later. Any suggestions from knowledgeable readers to improve the content will be gladly appreciated.

Next: 5 August >>

One year ago today, "Lockerbie bomber" Abdelbaset al Megrahi was still imprisoned in Scotland, convicted for the murder of 270, with an appeal of that endlessly stalled, and advanced prostate cancer drawing the grave closer to him. He was desperate to return home to Libya before the end, and the Libyan government was nearly as set on getting him back.

One way home had presented itself up to that point - a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) that had been Libya's brainchild, sponsored by Libya-UK business interests, and adopted by the UK government. One of the keen provisions of the PTA was that all legal proceedings - like Megrahi's dangerous second appeal - had to be closed first.

Another provision of the agreement, ratified on 5 May 2009, was its 90-day life span [1], which expired on this day last year, August 3. But Justice Secrtary Kenny MacAskill, had already "extended the deadline of the prisoner transfer request,” despite its being implausible to execute. [2]

Curiously, the same day one track was slated to stop (but didn't), a second way home came within reach. Megrahi had formally applied for Compassionate Release less than two weeks earlier, in late July. His original prognosis had been only in September 2008, when he was given “an informal mid-estimate of 18-24 months.” [3] Compassionate Release rules, first set-up in 1993, have no firm life expectancy standard, but do cite three months as a reasonable guideline.

By some time in July 2009, a "firm consensus" was reached by "a range of specialists" that Megrahi's cancer had become "hormone resistant," and so the prognosis has "has now moved to the lower end of expectations from ten months ago." [3] That had been 18-24 months, so minus ten from the low end leaves about eight months left.

An unnamed consulting doctor for the Scottosh Prison Service (SPS) looked Megrahi over again a year ago today [3]. This is widely believed to be Karol Sikora, but is apparently not. [4] (see also comments, below) Having last seen the prisoner on 26 July, the specialist - not paid by Libya that we know of - reported an alarming deterioration in the short interim. A report from a week later explained "the clinical assessment, therefore, is that a 3 month prognosis is now a reasonable estimate for this patient." [3]

The 10 August report that passes this on was from Scottish Prison Services health director, and expressed his own and a general agreement that the prisoner was suitable for compassionate release. There was no other specific agreement with three months offered. And of course none was needed; as explained above, that benchmark is a guideline, not a requirement.

But it was an important guideline, and it was on the record to inform the choice in Mr. MacAskill's hands alone. He had two tracks to consider now, one of which (the PTA) would cost Megrhi's appeal if used, and the other of which (compassion) could leave the way open to challenge the tenuous conviction...

Sources:
[1] http://www.libya-watanona.com/news/n2009/may/0509nwsc.htm
[2] Times Online. 21 August 2009. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6804645.ece
[3] Medical Report, 10 August 2009. PDF download page: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Justice/legal/lockerbie/CompassionateReleasePro/medical-report
[4] STV. 6 Sept.2009. http://news.stv.tv/scotland/121060-scots-govt-libyan-paid-doctors-did-not-influence-megrahi-release/

Iran Air 655 - Casus Belli Behind Lockerbie?

2011-07-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

Caustic Logic
15 March 2010
Last update July 3, 2011

Note, July 3, 2011: I'm simply bumping this post to the top to mark the 23rd anniversary today of this horrific and dubious incident that seems to have sealed the fate of Pan Am 103.

The USS Vincennes and the Downing of IA655:
Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled 28-minute flight from Bandar Abbas airport to Bahrain, on July 3 1988. An Airbus A300B2 flown by Capt. Mohsen Rezaian, IA655 left the ground at 10:17 am local time to cross the Straits of Sidra. It seems the plane was talking normally with ground control on open frequencies, was listed in flight registries, flying well within an established civilian air corridor, and transmitting the right civilian transponder code that clearly means something like the car window sign "Baby on Board." [1]

As IA655 steadily climbed to cruising altitude (14,000 feet for this short journey), it was suddenly struck with two powerful SM2 missiles fired from an American ship in Iranian waters below. The 290 passengers and crew (including 66 children) were all killed, either in the explosion and breakup, or after a three mile fall to the Persian Gulf below.

Officially, the crew of the USS Vincennes, which had opted to fire the missiles at that plane, had simply gotten confused in the thick of a separate naval battle they'd gotten into. After missing IA655's listing in the 'do not shoot' registry, misreading its transponder code as of military origin, and erring on its speed, heading/location, and altitude profile, the crew had decided the airbus was a fighter jet swooping down towards them for the attack, as all their misreadings jointly suggested. [2]

The troubling details and explanations of this bizarre accident are worth covering elsewhere, but ascribing the best intentions, the Vincennes fired in what seemed clear-cut self-defense, while they happened to be within Iranian waters. As such they fully earned their later commendations, like the responsible air-warfare coordinator, who won a navy medal for "heroic achievement [...] under fire." [3]

End of the War
At the Iraq-Iran war's commencement in 1980, the United States had sanctioned the bloodshed, so long as Iraq was on top. By the latter 1980s, the situation had shifted. Increased U.S. assistance and even direct shooting reflected fears that Iraq might lose forever the territory Iran was gaining. By the end of 1987, “we became,” a senior U.S. officer told ABC News, “forward air controllers for the Iraqi air force.” [4]

Operation Praying Mantis responded to Iranian mining of the Gulf with escalated U.S. attacks on Iranian gunboats, oil platforms, and tankers in April. [5] Immediately, protection of "neutral shipping" was also expanded; it was to enforce this protection that the Vincennes had been called to the Gulf.

At the same time, Washington and thence the UN Security Council was calling, with Resolution 598, for the war to simply end with past borders restored. Both sides had to see the benefit of an end to the grueling war, but after their own heavy sacrifices had improved their odds, Iran was reluctant to concede on the West's terms and timetable.

Along with a renewed Iraqi air and chemical offensives into Iran's cities in the spring and summer of 1988, the bizarre accident of IA655 had to have hastened Iran’s effective surrender a few weeks later. The precise role it played – minor, major, or peripheral - cannot be known for sure. However, an Iranian scholar stated at a conference hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center [paraphrased]

"A turning point in Iran's thinking came with the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in July 1988 by the American cruiser USS Vincennes. That incident apparently led Ayatollah Khomeini to conclude that Iran could not risk the possibility of U.S. open combat operations against Iran and he decided it was time to end the conflict." [6]

There is every reason to believe that’s just what the Americans wanted to get across, after the tragedy if not shortly before as well. Aside from unapologetic "regret” over the loss of innocent life, and blaming Iran for the warship's mistakes, the American message was best put by White House media handler Marlin Fitzwater in putting the accident in context:

Only an end to the war, an objective we desire, can halt the immense suffering in the region and put an end to innocent loss of life. Our goal is peace in the Gulf and on land. We urge Iran and Iraq to work with the Security Council for an urgent comprehensive settlement of the war pursuant to Resolution 598. Meanwhile, United States forces will continue their mission in the area, keenly aware of the risks involved and ready to face them. [7]

That is, as the Iranians likely read it, "we’ll keep on shooting at anything that might possibly be a threat as long as we “have to” hang around there, which is until Iran surrenders." About seven weeks after IA655 was torn down, an agreement was reached and hostilities between Iraq and Iran were officially and physically ended on August 20 1988. No territory was lost, but nearly a million people were.

But even after the cease-fire, one more battle loomed. It would be just as one-sided as the battle of IA-655, just about as deadly, and just as unacknowledged. Again, the perpetrators would go unpunished as innocents paid the price for others' crimes.

Revenge Pronouncements / Connective Tissue
Only in 1996 was a comprehensive legal agreement over the incident settled between Iran and America. Officially Iran accepted the accident story and took a small settlement $132 million and no acceptance of any guilt, exactly as offered by the US eight years earlier. [8] "Official" acceptance doesn't always mean that much; especially when the blood was fresh and tempers hot, Tehran never bought the bland American statements that the shoot-down was purely accidental. It's not even an unreasonable suspicion on their part - it's their apparent response I can't agree with.

Researcher Ludwig De Braeckeleer has assembled a useful compendium of Iranian death threats following the supposed accident. By this, various officials and ambassadors accused the United States of ''a barbaric massacre'' and an "act of terrorism." They pledged to launch "an appropriate response," to the "American crime," to "avenge the blood of their martyrs," and mete out "punishment to prevent further occurrence or recurrence of such unfortunate incidents." Most pointedly, hardliner Ali Akbar Mohtashemi (alt Mohtashemi-Pur), widely believed to have headed up the "appropriate response" planning, publicly "swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge." [9]

This wasn't just hardcore posturing for the Iranian street, but something representing a real danger; everyone in the know expected retaliation, and likely in-kind - the Iranians would seek to now kill American civilians on an airplane and see how we liked it. While uncertainty persists with no adequate investigation, the supposed payment was $10 million to the Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC. An early 1991 report, prepared by the National Security Agency for Gulf War intelligence use, stated:

"Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus." [10]

The revenge moved swiftly, it seems, perhaps starting before the cease-fire even. It was in early October that the GC cell in Neuss, West Germany was set up, October 13 that bomb maker Khreesat arrived and set to work, and October 26 when the cell was busted up in Operation: Autumn Leaves. Most have always suspected their goal had been to destroy an American airliner on Iran's instruction and with support from Syria, using the type of radio-disguised altimeter bomb found in the car with Khreesat.

Three other such bombs were missed in the first raid and only found later, and one bomb at least was never intercepted. Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA's Lockerbie probe, was interviewed for a program Shadow Over Lockerbie:

"[Cannistraro] says authorities focused on the likelihood that Marwan Khreesat's fifth bomb had blown up the Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie. "The immediate feeling was: we've missed someone. That someone in that cell had escaped with one of the explosive devices and succeeded in planting it on Pan Am 103." [11]

In other words, the terror tree was shaken and the "Autumn Leaves" had fallen and scattered, but they weren't all raked up neat. One may have drifted into the belly of PA103.

Obvious, Then Nothing
When the other shoe fell, the horror and carnage clearly mirrored IA655 with a mid-air explosion leaving 259 to deal with five miles of pure gravity however they did before dying against the cold winter soil of Scotland. To clarify the issue, just hours after the attack, two phone calls were placed from London to the Associated Press and UPI declaring in broken English:

"We, the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, are undertaking this heroic execution in revenge of blowing the Iran Air plane by America a few months ago." [12]

A CIA memo of the following day listed this first among a short list of responsibility claims. Among Islamic Jihad, the Ulster Defense League, and Mossad, the report said "we consider the claim from the Guadians of the Islamic Revolution as the most credible; previous attacks claimed by this group suggest it is pro-Iranian." It then listed several, with responsibility usually called in by an anonymous man: two assassination attempts on exiled Shah era leaders in exile, a plane hijacking a plane to secure the release of said assassins, and killing by car bomb a German businessman accused of selling missiles to Iraq while the war was on. [source]

Avenging the killing of 290 innocent Iranians by a US gunship seems in-line with the Guardians' philosophy, or perhaps some other Iranian agency, and most likely with technical help of the altimeter-triggered kind. Investigators, media reports, and the whole public mind went that way at first for at least a year, from no later than this ABC News broadcast of Feb 16 1989. Behind the suspicions of the PFLP-GC cell and its Khreesat bomb "a senior source overseeing the investigation" revealed that "some hard-line members of the Iranian revolutionary guard" may have arranged for the attack through these suspects. "Revenge for the shooting down of the Iranian Airliner by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf last summer was their motive," said reporter Brian Dunsmore in Lockerbie. [13]

And still in early 1990 Steve Emerson and Brian Duffy wrote in The Fall of Pan Am 103 how sponsorship ran with Syrian supports up to Tehran, driven by revenge for IA655, "shot down for the Fourth of July holiday, the Mullahs believed, to celebrate America's independence." [14] To repay these expensive 4th of July fireworks with an early Black Christmas present, followed by a Body Boxing Day and a few more, might be a potent signal.

Officially, Iran denies involvement in the bombing, but some, like suspected mastermind Mohtashemi, have claimed a leading role on candid occasions. In 1995, an Iranian magazine ran an interview where "Mohtashami-Pur said that he would soon reveal the "Lockerbie files" to the readers." The report was quashed from above and the magazine closed down. [15] Former Iranian president Abdulhassan Bani Sadr also has admitted proudly, in the 1990s, that “Iran ordered the attack and Ahmed Jibril carried it out,” [16] a claim he repeated to deBraeckeleer in 2008. [17]

As these statements were made and as of late 1991 the U.S. was officially and exclusively pursuing Libya for the crime, freeing some Persian tongues to confess with impunity, it seems. And yet, the U.S. says, there was no Iranian revenge. The faint possibility of Tehran's involvement in Libya's atrocity has been whispered, but never clarified or pursued in the slightest. [see: Iranian vs. Libyan Role in the Lockerbie Bombing]

Iranian leaders had planned to take down an American plane (at least one), had paid for it and had bombs built and ready to go. With hard cash, glory, and blood vendetta driving them, Mohtashemi and and his contractors must have given up after the Germany bust. This is just what the FBI, CIA, USG, Scottish Police, Camp Zeist judges, and others claim to find most likely. And then just as precisely as item 8849 from Malta replaced the Bedford suitcases in the luggage container's deadliest corner, the Libyans took their own incidentally identical revenge at just that time.

It's never been decided which motive drove the Libyans, but it's widely presumed to be the nearly three-year-old Operation: Eldorado Canyon bombings by U.S. forces. For the death of his adopted toddler daughter and a few dozen other Libyans, he ordered the Lockerbie bombing, while the level-headed Iranians waited for the court settlement and reparations after IA-655.

At least, that's what the FBI's SCOTBOM evidence strongly illustrates. A desperate defector, an amazingly resilient timer fragment, a bizarre unverifiable printout, and a pliable soon-to-be-millionaire witness, all prove the Libyans did it through Malta, however much sense that makes. And nothing solid implicating Iran or Syria or the PFLP-GC was found anywhere in there. Move along, nothing to see here - the real Lockerbie bomber was behind bars for a while.
---Sources:
[1] Ghasemi, Shapour. “Shooting Down Iran Air 655 [IA655]” Iran Chamber Society: History of Iran. 2004. http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/shootingdown_iranair_flight655.php
[2], [3] Charles, Roger. "Sea Of Lies: The Inside Story Of How An American Naval Vessel Blundered Into An Attack On Iran Air Flight 655 At The Height Of Tensions During The Iran-Iraq War-And How The Pentagon Tried To Cover Its Tracks After 290 Innocent Civilians Died." Newsweek. July 13 1992. http://www.newsweek.com/id/126358
[4] "The USS Vincennes: Public War, Secret War" ABC Nightline, Aired July 1 1992. Full Transcript, with extensive notes. ...
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-nightline-19920701.html
[5] Operation Praying Mantis. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis
[6] Steinberg, Dana. "The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: A CWIHP Critical Oral History Conference." http://wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.print&news_id=90411&stoplayout=true
[7] See [1]
[8] Wikipedia. Iran Air Flight 655. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
[9] DeBraeckeleer, Ludwig. "Tehran: 'The Blood of Our Martyrs Will Be Avenged' [Diary of a Vengeance Foretold] Part 2." Oh My News International. July 4 2008.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=383015&rel_no=1
[10], [15], [17] DeBraeckeleer, Ludwig. "Former Iranian President Blames Tehran for Lockerbie." http://www.thetorah.tv/misc/Former%20Iranian%20President%20Blames%20Tehran%20for%20Lockerbie.htm
[11] Biewen, John and Ian Ferguson. Shadow Over Lockerbie. 2000, American Radio Works. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/lockerbie/story/printable_story.html
[12] Emerson and Duffy p 56
[13] ABC News. Feb. 16, 1989: Pan Am 103 Flight Investigation. "A bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am 103 in December 1988." Anchor, Ted Koppel. Reporter, Barry Dunsmore, Lockerbie. Video currently viewable at:
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9443717
[14] Emerson and Duffy, p 59.
[16] The Maltese Double Cross. Produced, written, and directed by Allan Francovich, Hemar Enterprises, released November 1994. 2 hours, 36 minutes. Quote at 34:00 mark. Google Video

Primary Evidence: Frankfurt Airport Records

2011-06-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

First Posted 20 January 2010
last edits June 25, 2011

The System
[Analysis by Caustic Logic, based on wide but uncited skimming - may not be 100% accurate, but intended only to help understand the records below]

Frankfurt Airport in 1988 was the busiest air hub in Europe, serving many thousands of flights a day between Europe, the near east, nort Africa, and North America. The baggage handling system in 1988 was both state of the art and sloppy. Its workings can be understood as broken down to two parts, loosely termed outer and inner.

The outer portion was where luggage arrived at and left from the airport - a zone of tarmac and taxiing aircraft, wagons and luggage containers. From the planes, luggage was carted to a coding station, where items were placed on bar-code numbered trays (containers), one item per tray, and fed into the inner portion. Hard paperwork was apparently normally kept for transactions between aircraft and coding stations, both inclusive.

The Zeist Court explained “baggage for most airlines was handled by the airport authority, but PanAm had their own security and baggage handling staff.” Thus the airport and the airline each would then have responsibility for keeping track of their own efforts, and both should be called on in the investigation. The Frankfurt Airport Group would be in charge of unloading KM180, and Pan Am's people would handle loading and screening of luggage coming onto the outbound feeder flight.

The inner portion then is what the Court described as “a computer controlled automated baggage handling system” running beneath the airport. This vast electro-mechanic system automatically routed coded items along roller conveyors and through switching stations, at key spots scanned and logged. This system connected coding stations to the various stores, where luggage circulated until needed, and apparently up to loading gates. After this, they re-emerged topside and then to the connecting aircraft’s hold, where again, a record would be kept of loading procedures.

Primary Evidence
The relevant central computer data was produced, if under questionable circumstances, showing one particular item was coded at 13:07 into container no. 8849. It was then routed down to store for two hours until moved at 15:17 to gate B044, from which 103A loaded before its 16:53 departure. No passenger transferred from the air Malta flight to the PanAm one, so the bag thus illustrated was of the dreaded “unaccompanied” variety.

Apparently, no direct record of PA103A's loading was available to corroborate this. The unloading records for the Air Malta flight (KM180) that bag apparently came from, likewise do not figure in the evidence. And the mammoth central computer file aside from the items sent to 103A is missing without explanation. But the arrival of each flight at the airport, and the coding of one's luggage, were presented, aside from the crucial and curious "Frankfurt printout." Below are all available documents relevant to the claim of an unaccompanied bag, from flight KM180, being sent on to Flight 103A at Frankfurt. These will be given by the "production number" assigned them as evidence during the trial, and briefly explained. All images were originally found at Mebo pages, but seem to be genuine and unaltered. (see "Sources" at end)

Production 1068: The Opinion of the Court's paragraph 29 denotes this for “the evidence of Joachim Koscha, who was one of the managers of the baggage system at Frankfurt in 1988” It was his evidence that established KM180’s arrival and unloading time, 12:48-13:00. They do also cite a “record,” but provided no direct citation.

Production Null: This is the designation – none – given to KM180 unloading papers in the trial. Denis Phipps, former head of security, British Airways, has closely inspected the primary records of different airlines and airports connected to the disaster. He said in The Maltese Double Cross [video, 1994] “the records from Frankfurt were by no means complete." Among his concerns:

“There was no record of who unloaded that flight KM180 when it arrived at Frankfurt. We don't know who the loaders were. There was no record of the number of bags that were actually unloaded from that flight. There were no records that I could find.”

It isn’t entirely clear if paperwork normally was kept for this – it might have been a policy to determine the number of bags from the computer system, which could count the number of items coded at a certain station and time and take that as the number from the flight coded then. It would be a grossly imperfect system, considering the reliability of this method, as mentioned above. But it would line up with the known laxness of procedure there, and mean one less suspiciously missing record.

Production 1092: This is an “interline writer’s sheet” filled out by Andreas Schreiner, who was in charge of monitoring the arrival of baggage at V3 That bears to record one wagon of baggage from KM180 arriving at V3 at 13:01.Within V3 are seven coding stations, where luggage is placed into bar-code numbered trays to enter bottomside. They cite the sheet’s contents in table form and it seems like they had these records at hand. No number of bags in that wagon is given.
This brings us to the reliability of coding station logs in determining where a particular item really came from. The Zeist judges heard testimony that “luggage was always delivered from one flight only” at any given time." [Opinion of the Court, para 29] Taking this literally would mean a station's log saying flight X was handled from 1:00-1:05 means an item shown in the computer system as coded there at 1:01 is clearly from flight X.

But this is not completely sound. Dennis Phipps noted the unreliability of these logs in the Maltese Double Cross, and it's been widely noted that lapses of stray bags being inserted during another flight's coding are not only possible but recorded, and common sense itself suggests such a presumption is, at the least, not guaranteed to be right. The degree of correlation between coding time and flight number is certainly higher than zero and less than 100%, and debatable from there. A separate post, Coding Station Reliability, will address this controversy, but generally below it should remain an open question.

Production 1061: This document (above) was identified by witnesses Mr Schreiner and Mr Koscha “as a work sheet completed by a coder to record baggage with which he dealt.” The name of the coder in question was Koca, who was not called as a witness.” Pity, since the document shows us little detail. The signatures alternate Koca and Candar, listing either container numbers or numbers of wagons of luggage, the flight number it’s from, time they started coding, and stop time. The relevant line is the last one – one wagon of luggage from KM180 started coding at 13:04, and ended at a time disputed as 13:10 or 13:16. (13:10 yields a time closer to those previously noted, and it's what the Court decided. The difference is six minutes of time, which could have increased the likelihood of a stray bag being introduced. Again, refer to the post on coding station reliability.

Production 1062: This is the court’s code for some unspecified “documentary evidence” that “the aircraft used for PA103A arrived from Vienna (as flight PA124) and was placed at position 44, from which it left for London at 1653.”

Production 1060 (at left - r-click/new window for readable view) This is the famous computer printout, the single document that allows “the inference," drawn by the Scottish Judges, "that an item which came in on KM180 was transferred to and left on PA103A.” It's a list of items routed to PA103A, taken by airport employee Bogomira Erac for personal reasons and handed over to investigators only a month after the disaster.

It was the first time they'd seen it. What's highly unusual about this evidence is that the German federal police (BKA) were unable to secure their own copy, right off the computer, in the days after the crash. In the end, we had to rely on a memento copy from someone’s locker, which existed only by sheer luck. It was that close to having a whole airport's luggage records go completely missing, right after such a massive event demanded that information. The troubling case of the missing records is worthy of a detailed stand-alone post. Another interesting question is why the BKA then made the official investigators in Scotland and Washington wait another six months before sharing it with them. It wasn't until mid-August 1989 that Scottish police were able to see this pivotal record that wound up turning the investigation around to Malta and thence Libya.

Whatever the book got wrong, Trail of the Octopus is helpful on this issue.

"On 17 August 1989, eight months after the disaster, Chief Detective Superintendent John Orr received from the BKA what was said to be a computer print-out of the baggage-loading list for Pan Am Flight 103A from Frankfurt to London on the afternoon of 21 December 1988. Attached to this were two internal reports, dated 2 February 1989, describing the inquiries that BKA officers had made about the baggage-handling system at the airport. Also provided were two worksheets, one typewritten, the other handwritten, that were said to have been prepared on 21 December by airport workers at key points on the conveyor-belt network." [Coleman/Goddard]

Mrs. Erac' testimony at Camp Zeist in 2000 clarified that the printout was not taken to the BKA until approximately the last week of January, so a 1 February foray is a perfect match for being spurred by the printout. Any records of any earlier efforts, fruitful or not, remain under wraps. Upon getting the papers in August, Orr and his men quickly investigated the airport themselves, and also got more serious about previous clues leading to Malta.

What the printout shows, briefly, is 111 items listed numerically by container number. The relevant portions are highlighted in the condensed version below. PA103A is referred to herein as F1042. The relevant item 8849 was coded at station S0009, which it’s been determined means station 206, at 1307. That is a fit with KM180’s load. It then goes to Gate B044 at 1523, the same few-minute span most of 103's luggage arrived. What happened from there is outside the computerized system and not recorded here. But according to this, two late-coded items were sent to a separate gate B041, and curiously, these two items bracket the apparent bomb bag, numerically speaking, and so are visible below. All 108 items not shown here were sent to gate 44.

So broadly there are three possibilities:
- If it could be certain that station 209 at 1307 means KM180 and nothing else, this would be solid evidence of a bag from that flight.
- It could have been an item of another origin passing through there at just the right time to appear as from KM180. This does require a certain acceptance of coincidence, but cannot be ignored.
- The data could clearly mean to say KM180, but itself be fraudulent. This would explain the printout's appearance and the primary data's disappearance. Perhaps the two were not really unrelated bad and good luck, but two halves of a bait-and-switch routine, perhaps carried out by the BKA for uncertain reasons.

Production Null: The normal, official, system-wide, right from the computer luggage records.
As has been mentioned, for some reason the primary data of luggage movements was lost, but avoided making a big noise once a copy was luckily found. So it was no loss, we might presume. But how would we know?

There may never be answers to the riddle of the lost computer data, but a dedicated post is warranted to explore what we do and don't know about it.

Production Null: PanAm’s loading records for flight 103A.

---
Sources:
Image: Prod 1092
Image: Prod 1060
(other images by Caustic Logic)
[Coleman/Goddard] TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA. Chapter 7. Online posting.
[Opinion of the Court] PDF download link

Two Secondary Suitcases?

2011-06-14T03:03:00.000-07:00

June 13/14, 2011

The Soft, Blue and Maroon Case
Below is a screen capture from al Jazeera's new video, of a severely blasted suitcase, gathered back together for investigator's cameras following the bombing of PA103. This piece of luggage was listed in the examination notes of Dr. Hayes as item 4.2.14, a blue soft-shell American Tourister case.

It was owned by passenger Patricia Coyle, who interlined from Germany on the feeder PA103A, which also officially carried the bomb (although other evidence suggests it was manually placed in London). By RARDE's questionable and belated finding, it was placed just beneath the bomb suitcase, on the floor of luggage container AVE 4041. It looks just about blown-up enough to have been the primary case - the one containing the bomb. But it was what I'll call "secondary", next to and touching the primary one.

I recognized the photo even without a label from the description given of the unique remains in the trial transcripts, and the readable item numbers support that call. This case had always sounded supremely blast-damaged and largely unaccounted-for, and this elusive photograph 76 shows about what I expected, if even more so. The examination notes (culled as read-back from transcripts) explain:

"The following 27 items, the larger fragments of which are collectively shown in photograph 76, were identified as component parts of a blue American Tourister brand softshell suitcase. The severe overall damage to the identified component parts is consistent with this suitcase having been located in contact with the suitcase that contained the improvised explosive device at the moment of explosion."

The case had been supported by a simple wire frame, with flexible plastic of blue, maroon, and black filling it in the body and trim. TSH/346 is the large piece wrapping around the outside, essentially the whole middle band of the case. It was said to have been blasted at least partly into the neighboring container, AVN 7511, along with some pieces of the container and of the primary suitcase.

There are only about ten further pieces not shown, all very small. As can be seen, the majority of that base material didn't turn up, left in the tiniest tatters lost to wind, sea, and mud if not to the fireball of the explosion itself.

The Hard, Antique Copper One
Here, at left, is what was assembled and called the primary suitcase. It was a different type entirely, a brown or antique copper colored hard-shell Samsonite, Silhouette 4000 series. Given in the report as luggage item 4.1.2, its remains were described thus:

The following 56 items were examined and identified as the component parts of one of the hardshell Samsonite brand suitcases from the Silhouette 4000 range. It was also established beyond any doubt that this item of luggage had been subjected to a violent internal explosion and thus had originally contained an improvised explosive device. Except where noted, all of the items examined below are collectively shown in photograph 49.

The bolded part is the one I here contend. Very similar damage, considering the material differences, had the American Tourister declared as just beneath the bomb. Here, Hayes seems a little too certain for comfort that this extremely splintered suitcase was wrapped around the explosion itself.

As with the other case, the pieces not shown are the smallest ones, especially the many fragments of the cardboard divider from the middle of the suitcase, closest to the alleged bomb (PT/68 in the lower corner is the one sample of that shown).

The delicate suitcase lining fabric not much further away is represented by one nearly-complete side of the stuff - the giant 22-inch PK/1310A, stretched across the middle of the photo. The combined effect of this gauze, the surviving cardboard, and the other very large fragments of shell plastic, is that this case experienced a very asymmetrical blast involvement, with one whole side - and even the middle, it seems - shielded by something - like the upper half of the case and half the primary case and its contents above that.

Among this possible lower half, PI/911 in the upper left is nearly a foot square, and at one point (January 1989) Dr. Thomas Hayes of RARDE had concluded it was from was from "the lower side of a suitcase, compressed and fractured in a manner suggesting it was in contact with a luggage pallet's base and subjected to explosive forces from above." This means beneath the bomb suitcase, which was on level two and blasted from within, not above. (see: the Monster of Newcastelton Forest)

That opinion changed at some uncertain later point - by the time of the final report in 1990, PI/911 was said to have flecks of blue plastic stuck to it, suggesting it had rested on the American Tourister, not the container's floor.

Two Brown Hard-Shells?
This all has direct relevance to the story of John Bedford, the luggage loader at Heathrow now famous for seeing and reporting a brown hard-shell Samsonite case - or perhaps two - inside the container's lower corner. In part, he told police in January 1989:

“They were [both] hard cases, the type Samsonite make. One was brown in color and the other one, if it wasn't the same color, it was similar.”

No passengers on Flight 103 carried any such luggage and only the one shown above was recovered after. Yet here is at least one, and possibly two, such cases confirmed in the container before a second or third such case came in from Malta on the German feeder. This was around two hours after Bedford's sighting, and officially, it was set on top of the Coyle case, in the same exact spot the Bedford bag(s) just vanished from, never to be seen again. Officially, that's what happened.

If he described two cases of the same exact color and style, where did the other one go when only the remains of one turned up?

One possibility I've aired before is the one we've seen is not the primary suitcase. Rather, it might be another secondary case, like ms. Coyle's, with the primary case having effectively vanished under the force of its own more-powerful-than-thought explosion. At right is a graphic (all to scale and accurate) that illustrates that arrangement.

I had backed off a bit on the idea of two matching cases, for the sake of simplicity. But this new image of suitcase 4.2.14 changes things, showing me that both of the suitcases in question are comparable for extreme damage. Below I've placed both images, fragments in silhouette, side-by-side to approximately the same scale. Seeing them together like this, it's hardly obvious the left one is the most obliterated. Soft-shell vs. hard-shell construction will give different results, and the total number of recovered fragments - 56 compared to 27 - suggests that, in fact, more of Ms. Coyle's less durable case material was lost to the explosion and the elements than were lost from the primary case that should have seen by far the worst of it.

Really, seeing this image re-affirms to me the idea that these are both cases that had been situated next to the primary one, which was presumably the other Bedford suitcase, worse off yet - gone into dust, along with everything in it. This would mean the clothes, the bomb radio, timer, umbrella, everything deemed to be from the primary case, were either from one of the neighboring cases, or were planted. Considering how neatly they pointed to Libya and Megrahi, and how plagued they are with plausibility issues and handling anomalies, I'm going with planted.

Video: Lockerbie: The Pan Am bomber

2011-06-11T02:38:00.000-07:00

June 11 2011

This is the new documentary aired by al Jazeera English the other day, and posted by them graciously on Youtube. It's nothing short of amazing.

Feraday's Forensic Follies, Section Sixty-Seven

2011-06-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

June 11 2010
last updates June 11/13 2011

A few days ago I posted a collected timeline of forensic finds and coclusions from RARDE's "scientists" Dr. Thomas Hayes and Mr. Allen Feraday. These were supposed to have led to the identification of a vaguely Libyan radio model holding the bomb - Toshiba BomBeat RT-SF16. The end result is bizarre, with a hundred implied complications, like those presented by a tiny bit of blasted circuit board dubbed PT/30.

This 3mm x 4mm fragment was allegedly found on June 8 1989 by Dr. Hayes, or June 18 by Feraday, depending. Both versions match on where it was found - embedded in a piece of soft blue American Toursiter suitcase owned by victim Karen Noonan and labeled PK/2128. [Leppard p207] Its PT number is lower than the famous PT/35 found weeks earlier (on paper), as noted by the defence at trial. This would be unusual if not for all the rest being just as out of order (see PT/31, PT/56, etc...). Stranger yet, Dr. Hayes' examination notes of PT/30 read in part:

It has been partially delaminated by the blast and, hence, does not possess the expectedgreen lacquer and/or solder tracking upon its rear face as this has been ripped completely away. The upper [brown] face of the fragment bears part of the white painted characters C32 and a depiction of an electrical resistor.

Consider the sample loading of the alleged bomb (below) in a normally-assembled RT-SF16 radio (minus its cassette assembly). The main circuit board is the one seen along the top, brown-colored component side down. This surfaces is that painted with little white markings that survived the blast of that Semtex about one inch distant. It was the inverse side, green lacquered and tracked with solder, that was blasted away. Was the board backwards?

PT/30 is not alone in having its painted face survive readable and unburnt. Consider this largest portion of the earlier find AG/145 (at right). Its markings "L106" and "101" are plain as day, and only the edges are burnt a little. The smaller part of AG/145 is similarly marked, with "02." It would thus seem the terrorists allegedly scraped off all those little components off their contacts and flipped the board backwards to fit it back in. Except that the AG/145 fragments also had nice green backsides that showed no sign of blast either, and allowed the first identification in February.

Anyway, to bring this back to Feraday, he was reportedly excited about PT/30 turning up. The radio model RT-SF16 was already identified on May 11, we hear, and this fit it just as perfectly as the AG/145 fragments did, and was noted immediately by Hayes on June 8. So Mr. Feraday reportedly waited a few months, and then in September took the thing to the evidence holding facility Dexstar to see if it could match anything there.

Later, in December, DI William Williamson sent SIO Henderson a memo describing this: "On his visit to Dexstar on 14 September 1989 Mr Feraday viewed a large number of items of circuitry which had been withdrawn for his examination; none of these items was a match for PT 30." [Leppard p 207] (note: PT 30 is just Leppard's way of writing PT/30 - space instead of slash. It's the same item)

Williamson went on to ask Henderson to look into inspecting evidence held by the Germans to see if a match could be found to Khreesat's work - particularly some alarm clocks he was known to have bought. Feraday had "on a number of occasions repeated his keen interest in any item of circuitry," Williamson explained, "or indeed in any digital clocks or other similar items which could contain a circuit board for examination and comparison at RARDE against produsction PT 30." [Leppard 207-208]

Earth to Allen, your science guy Hayes has May 11 as the date he IDd the radio, and on June 8 found that PT/30 matches it. Why the running around drama in mid-September looking for some whole other fit? The obvious answers somehow elude this blogger, but one thing I notice is the timing of this fevered search relative to a more fruitful circuitry quest: PT/35(b), the lucky corner of a Libyan MST-13 timer main board. The day after Feraday's reported inquest at Dexstar, evidencing that "keen interest" in circuit board clues, he sent a memo to the same DI Williamson cited above. This was regarding a four-month old (on paper) find by Dr. Hayes.

In retrospect, this memo is rather vague, not mentioning PT/35(b) by name or giving many direct clues. It could almost be about PT/30, except for the cited curve. Only the mammoth MST-13 chunk and its double-underlined #1 is large enough for that detail. By my rough measurement of a scaled MST-13 jpeg the curve at upper right has a 0.5" diameter. I'd defer to Feraday here.

So this is a letter about that amazing but yet unidentified clue PT/35(b), keenly ignored it seems until that date - four months after the paperwork shows it found. But only one day after Feraday's own foray over the already identified PT/30 (says the same Williamson months later).

Or am I just making too much out of a simple mix up? Not likely, as that memo of December 19, just ahead of the anniversary, shows Feraday behind the scenes urging yet more bogus action over the already identified circuitry. Over six months following its match-up with the known bomb radio, he was pestering Williamson to pester Henderson about trying to find a match for PT/30 over in Germany if possible.

If all these things are the true exploits of professional and even-handed investigators ... my God, what kind of MKULTRA experiments were they doing with the ventilation at RARDE? No, these "facts" must have appeared as they were convenient, with little regard for those which came before or after. It's the only sane explanation.
---
Update June 11/13, 2011
Some amazing screen grabs from Al Jazeera English's new video.

AG/145 fragments, separated and partly cleaned, hugely magnified and looking less burnt to ash than ever:

Here's the second largest fragment, placed against its spot of origin on the brown/orange, lettered, blast-ward side of the board.

And here is the backside of the larger one against the green, shielded, solder-tracked side.

It's this precise match-up, Allen Feraday said, that helped him at least narrow down the radio model by mid-February 1989. In both images, note the material - flimsy, paper-fiber-and-resin, not fiberglass.

As we can see comparing the first and third of these images, neither side of that largest bit shows any sign of blast damage (extreme heat, for example). But where on the board are these fragments from? The middle, just one inch from the Semtex supernova? Or at one of the ends, a couple of inches away? There's an image that clears that up, and they showed it as well in the video, bless them. I compared it to the assembled IED mock-up, rotated so features matched. I then indicated the rough areas for both AG/145 and PT/30.

That gives at most about 1.5 inches for the blast wave to chill-out, and nothing but the flimsy little capacitors (or ??) attached to those spots to shield the face. The left-hand one is in as good a spot as it gets to survive, but still, I can't cite the measure of the force of this blast except that it ruptured an airliner's hull at two feet distant, after being slowed by the luggage container, the suitcase, the clothing, and the radio's case. Before all of these, at 1.5 inches, tops, fresh and full-force ... No way.

Beyond that, do recall, as explained above, that Hayes found PT/30 had the wrong side - the green one - blasted away, while all of AG/145 shows damage to neither side. Another oddity is that both AG/145 at PT/30 would go about the same direction in the blast wave - out from the center in all directions. If PT/30 were blasted straight down, AG/145 should go down and to the left pretty much.

Officially PT/30 wound up wedged into the outer frame segment (IIRC) of the blue softshell on the container floor, just beneath the bomb bag - if so, why would AG/145 wind up, as Mr. Thomas Claiden testified, blasted into a fold of the data plate, on the outside of the container, halfway up its side, two feet or more above the bomb bag?
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A Costly New Libya - Rented, Not Owned

2011-06-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

June 5 2011

This rare update is spurred by an excellent video I just saw from Journeyman productions - not sure if they made it or who they are - it says 2003, which seems right - but it's a rare video on Libya and Lockerbie that gives real insight.

The $10 billion mentioned was never paid. It was set at 2.7 billion in 2003, and settled up by, I think, 2008 to a slightly different tune. I don't have the details handy, but lawyers got a lot of it.

The video mentions this as being no admission of guilt but rather the government's purchase of "a license" to simply be allowed back into the world economy (see 7:25). Further, Libya agreed to drop its own claims over the 1986 US bombing, by "mad dog" Reagan, of Tripoli and Benghazi, that killed around fifty innocents. This was in retaliation for another attack the Libyans have sworn they never carried out, and the effects are covered touchingly in the video. Note the contrast of the victims of that bombing in seeking justice compared to those whose case was against Libya, and who had it muscled through to amazingly painful effects for Libya, by the best of Anglo-American imperial might.

Of course, as Professor Black explains here in part, that case itself is weak and unreliable, the judgment confirming it perverse. See the rest of this site for a fuller exploration of the depth of unreliability dug out by the Lockerbie case. But they paid up anyway, because the sanctions rested on the perverse verdict and those were quite real.

Detente did follow from 2003-2011, greased along with Tripoli swearing off all terroorism, real or imagined, abandonimg all WMD programs, including a nuclear deterrent, promising reforms in Libya, and opening to foreign oil companies. But the companies weren't fully happy, the system was still too Libyan, and plots still simmered under the surface, and now ...

It's insane to think eight years later, all paid-up, the country is finally being destroyed completely anyways. At least $60 billion (perhaps more like $100 billion) in Libyan government funds - for military, civilian, and all uses - was just frozen by the US and a handful of other countries. And the NATO bombs are falling across non-rebel Libya. This is all officially based on some muddled humanitarian concern that can only be answered by Gaddafi "leaving" and taking his system - women empowerment, massive benefits for citizens at large, limited foreign control, etc. - with him. This is all being handed to us sewn together wrong, and I'm still working on fixing that, as much as I can, at my new blog The Libyan Civil War: Critical Views.

Announcement: New Blog!

2011-04-24T03:14:00.001-07:00

April 24 2011

I've just created a new blog dedicated to the Libyan Civil War: critical views, concerns, complaints, conspiracy theories, and so on. I hope to make it very informative and possibly make it into a hub for multiple writers to organize some mental resistance. There's not much up at the moment (three posts, one a re-post from elsewhere), but there are over a dozen others in draft form and man, many others in the planning and research stages. An explanatory top-post will be up soon.

The blog is here:
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/
Anyone concerned about the war should check it once now, and again in a few days. And in-between and after, feel free to submit useful articles and links to caustic_logic@yahoo.com.

Thirty-Eight Minutes

2011-04-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Bomb-Timing Clue for London Intro
First posted March 28 2010
Completely re-written Jan. 18 2011

Five Altimeter Bombs
It was a well-placed bomb detonation in the forward hold of PA103 that sealed the fate of 270 people on the evening of December 21, 1988. To be precise, the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) decided it had detonated at 19.02:50 (7:03pm) – almost exactly thirty-eight minutes after it left the ground from London’s Heathrow Airport at 6:25.

This time span, officially decided on by Libyan plotters for unclear reasons, is an uncanny fit with another technology, controlled by another group entirely – Ahmed Jiibril’s PFLP-GC. To recap, Marwan Khreesat is a Jordanian intelligence operative and long-practicing maker of airliner-killing bombs for Jibril (with exact allegiance unclear in a chicken-and-egg sort of way). Khreesat’s bombs were triggered by altitude (air pressure) and hidden inside consumer electronics – usually radio-cassette players. In the fall of 1988 he was called in again by the PFLP-GC on a mission for Iran – avenge the US destruction of Iran Air flight 655 by destroying an American airliner themselves.

Khreesat was hired to make or modify five bombs, and contrary to GID orders (as we've heard them), compelled to make them fully armed. Only one radio-IEDs of the five was intercepted on the arrest of Khreesat and the whole cell on October 26 1988. Three more of these were found later by German authorities and studied, given the numbers below. All seized Khreesat devices, in order of discovery:

1) Toshiba BomBeat 453 radio-cassette
2) Sanyo computer monitor
3) Ultrasound radio
4) Ultrasound radio

The fifth device, which Khreesat says he only soldered two wires on after someone else constructed it, was a different Toshiba radio (not the BomBeat seized nor the Libyan BomBeat SF-16 officially accepted). The someone else who made it was likely "Abu Elias," a relative of Jibril’s and a senior PFLP-GC operative. Khreesat thinks Abu Elias worked by copying his own work, perhaps recycling some parts from the fifth test model he made for Jibril back in 1985.

This one hasn’t been studied, as it officially never turned up. Many, however, still suspect it did surface – on Pan Am flight 103. So we’ll return to it at the end, after grasping the four that were definitely never used.

Gobel and Khreesat explain the time aspect
[Note: a separate post details the hardware end of these bombs in a little more detail.]
David Leppard’s curious 1991 book On the Trail of Terror describes the work done by German investigators on the four bombs found in Germany, and summarized the findings of BKA scientist “W. A. Gobel." This looked at how the altimeter and time delay modifications worked. Here he refers only to unit 1, the seized BomBeat 453:

“Gobel had tested the performance of the pressure pick-up gauge in a vacuum chamber. The circuit would close at a pressure between 940 and 950 milibars - equivalent to an altitude of about 2,400 feet. The contact point was connected by a wire to a condenser which acted as a time delay switch. The condenser was an insulator, absorbing the electrical charge until it fired. At this point the circuit closed, detonating the bomb.”

The condenser here is what’s elsewhere called an ice-cube timer – a simple metal circuit, coiled-up, I believe, and encased in a cube of translucent resin (looks like an ice-cube made with dingy water).

"When the necessary operating height has been reached the fall in pressure connected with it will start the timing mechanism, and when the delay period has elapsed the detonator will be activated. […] The time delay of the electronic component fluctuates over a wide margin since the structure of the circuit is relatively simple. Time delays between 35 and 45 minutes were measured." [p 11-12]

This 35-45 minute range is often cited, wrongly I think, as the range of times to be expected in field usage. But a passage from Khreesat's interview with the FBI in November 1989 explained that the variability comes from repeated tests on the circuit in a lab setting:

"Khreesat advised that the times are not exact and the time changes depending upon how long the timers have been tested after last being used. They usually reset to zero after a day. He used to test the timers three times in a row before installing the timer in a device. He found that in each test the time decreased. When this happened, he put the timers aside, and the next day when he tested them, they would run for the same time as when he had first started them." [Marshman report, page 32, PDF p 19]

The variability then, with repeated testing, is downward from a long baseline time. Absent repeated tests, which might be unwise in an assembled explosive device, the timers would all have, as the designer described them as having, one set time each, and it would be the long time. So in use, the device Gobel analyzed would detonate about 45 minutes after triggering. This would be more than 50 minutes, not 38, from takeoff.

That certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a fit. Khreesat also told the FBI that the timers were not the same from one unit to the next:

"One of the timers was a half-hour timer, one was for three-quarters of an hour, and one was for one hour. Khreesat does not recall what time the fourth timer was set for. None of the timers were for more than one hour." [Marshman report, p 32]

These seem to go in nice 15-minute increments - 30, 45, 60. His early bombs in 1970 and 1972 blew up too early - about 15 minutes after triggering - leaving two of three planes able to safely re-land. Thus for "stronger medicine" in the 1980s, he went for increments at or higher than 30 minutes. By deduction, the fourth unit was a repeat of one of the other three.

Three more to consider
Herr Gobel at the BKA, as we’ve seen above, made a close study of Khreesat device number 1, apparently housing the (or a) 45-minute ice-cube timer. He also looked at number two, the IED hidden inside a Sanyo computer monitor. This was armed with Semtex-H like the others, and rigged with the same basic altimeter-timer arrangement. “Calculated on the basis of the values of the built-in components,” Gobel wrote, “the delay time is put at between 30 and 35 minutes.” [Zeist transcripts p 8769] It's unclear if he means test variability or range of estimates for its one field-use time.

Leppard bemoans the German’s presumptions based on only one bomb sample to study, but they had units 1 and 2 and also, at one point, two other such devices. Numbered 3 and 4, these were both housed in Ultrasound radios, both found after the Sanyo monitor in a third raid, and were both destroyed under grim circumstances.

In April 1989, one of the Ultrasound IEDs inexplicably detonated while in the hands of a highly experienced BKA bomb technician, killing him and maiming an assistant. The other of the two (it’s not clear which is 3 and which is 4) was then destroyed rather than be studied, for obvious safety and psychological reasons.

But despite the British alarm over this German “sloppiness,” it wasn’t a complete scientific loss. Aside from what was missing in the rubble, which was safe enough to examine, the BKA’s forensics section ST33 noted on what remained from one the two:

“[T]he accompanying capacitor is of is of the same value as in 1 and 2, but has however, jumped out of circuit. […] it can be assumed from the remains of the circuit that the time delay was in the same region as 1 and 2." [p 144]

From four intercepted IEDs, we have three capacitors, all apparently of the vague 30-45 minutes “region.” This comports reasonably with Khreesat’s list of 30, 45, 60, and one repeat. It seems to be lacking anything with a longer time like one hour, but one device, likely the one that killed a bomb tech, was not studied like this. Perhaps that was the one-hour unit.

The results are not 100% conclusive with the information I have, but it remains consistent enough between Khreesat and the Germans to say we have a double-corroborated explanation, more-or-less, of what to expect with each of the four seized devices.

And the Fifth?
Khreesat felt that all four bombs he was tasked with re-used the timers and altimeters from his 1985 test run. But that involved five radios, one of which he says was kept intact by Jibril to study. It’s worth wondering if these same parts, fitting the same patterns, were later used to build Abu Elias’ fifth device. But wondering aside, we can’t be certain.

We can examine the facts of December 21 to see whether or not it’s compatible. Below is a graphic from the AAIB's report on the bombing, based on Flight 103’s data recorder. The key line here is altitude, of course labeled “ALT.” The other is some measure of airspeed. The left bar gives feet above sea level (add three zeroes) and the bottom gives time in minutes from data start.

In the marked-up detail at left, note that the altitude doesn’t change for the first minute – takeoff is at minute one, not zero. We can see here that 2,400 feet, the outside pressure that would trigger the timer, is really not very high, and was reached about two or three minutes in. If this pressure decided things for the 38-minute detonation, we’d be looking at a 35 or 36-minute timer, something not within the Khreesat arsenal.

But inside the plane, where the suitcases were, the pressure is controlled and drops more slowly. The work of Rainer Gobel, as related by Leppard, is also confirmed by Paul Foot, writing in 2001 in Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice, as addressing the expected rate where it matters:

"A clearer description of this ice-cube timer was given the same day by Rainer Gobel, physicist for the German police, the BKA. He had a remarkable insight into how long such a timer would take to set off an explosion. “Pressure change in the cabin,” he said, “is regulated automatically. It happens more slowly than the drop of pressure in the air through which the plane is flying, which means, according to the documents which were provided to me, in a plane of the aforementioned class, about seven minutes after take-off the pressure within the cabin will have dropped to such an extent that 950 millibars or hectopascals will have been reached at which the barometric gauge would be involved and a circuit, a current, would be activated.” [p 19]

Some would protest, and fairly I think, that we can't be certain that even if the PFLP-GC's bombs were involved, that this one used the same altimeter setting, or altimeter, or even timer style, as the units examined. But considering the group's reliance on Khreesat’s formula and available materials (the fifth device from 1985), it seems possible enough that it would. And Gobel's "about seven minutes" is quite a nice fit with the roughly eight required to make this fit into Khreesat’s 30, 45, 60 framework. Thus the strong possibility that cannot be reasonably discounted here is that Flight 103’s ascent triggered another ice-cube timer, of the 30-minute size, about eight minutes after wheels-up.
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Watching the Flags

2011-04-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Caustic Logic
March 19 2010
last update Feb. 1 2011

reference is made throughout to veiwership as measured by Flag Counter. My current Flag Counter returns can be seen here for anyone curious.
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March 19: I've been greatly enjoying the Flag Counter I had put on this site when it went public about two months back. As you can see (at right, "Visitors") from the hits since January 25, an average of about 88 views per day. Some days up to a third of those may be just me, obsessively editing and making a hit each time I review. But the flag counter only shows unique computers accessing the site and where they are (or show as) plugged in.

(see graphic at bottom for most recent numbers laid out on a map)

As a scholar of "false flag" events, I'm a little skeptical of these little flags, but still it's interesting to watch. It's fun to take it in like a competition. I don't follow football or sports at all, usually, but this "game" revolves around my little/big site.

Over fifty countries so far from all relevant continents have at least one viewer - One Libyan computer has been able to view The Lockerbie Divide, it says. One Jordanian, right after my Khreesat piece. One "European Union." A lot of ones. Someone with diplomatic e-mail contacts must have plugged it, since UN ambassadors is one of the few things, besides viewers of this site, most countries have just one of, from India to Iceland, Barbados to Brazil.

Few of these countries' viewers show the interest to get into the multiple views with 'horizontal seeding.' Those that do have their "gestalt" reasons I can partly guess to have at least a few people interested. Malta is a workhorse of support here, per capita. From a population under half a million, they hold steady around sixth place, once rivaling the United States (currently 47 distinct viewers). They were of course stuck with the stigma of having hosted the Libyan terror plot and failing to stop it, and had their counter-points simply brushed off. Puny Maltese! But hey, such a little country, no one can blame them letting the Libyans suborn them in ways still not explained.

I'm not sure why the 39 Belgian computers (7th) showed interest in particular, but the 23 from Netherlands (8th) have hosting the Zeist trial in their memories to stir interest. Canada (9) - I don't know. Home to a lot of Arab exile types. [Update 5/23: Three Canadian passengers died on flight 103, and they have families...] France (12) had the UTA 772 bombing and related Libya problems, were prime pushers for sanctions, etc. Sweden (no. 11) hosted the Abu Talb sideline and were thus involved in the early investigation as it started towards Malta. Australia (10) is the new home of the millionaire key-witness-and-handler duo the Gauci brothers, Tony and Paul, formerly of Malta. 10 viewers, so at least eight non-Gaucis.

The 61 viewers from the Federal Republic of Germany (5th) might be especially interested in the Autumn Leaves/Khreesat angle, where they may have hosted the makers of the bomb that brought down PA103. Some might have looked at my unusual take on the Frankfurt printout. I think Germany was in 3rd place once, but usually a bit behind South Africa (4th). Nelson Mandela, more than anyone else, helped convince both Gadhafi and the Americans to agree to the Zeist trial. Central negotiator Robert Black also "winters" there and has friends, and in other ways interest remains high enough to send 68 computers clicking here.

Early on the Brits (UK) were the leading edge of viewership here by a wide margin, with their official partners in handling the crime, the United States, trailing badly. Old Glory has stayed consistently in the top five, but barely at points (see Malta, below). A shame since Americans were targetted, were hit like never before, and then Washington led the push against Libya, the sanctions, etc. To the extent Americans remember the incident, they maintain an obsessive certainty this was all correct, and a desire to push the blame higher. And yet... they aren't googling it in droves to keep learning, even as Megrahi lingers and doubts metastasize. That's interesting.

The USA toggled around with South Africa and Germany for places 3, 4 and 5 for the first weeks. Now, with the help of my family and friends and at least Richard Marquise and a few of his, plus whoever else, my homeland has consistently held a steady third place for some weeks now. 86 computers have viewed the site, it says. Two are mine. 84 Americans is not bad for nearly two months, considering how uninteresting the evidence and details are to them. But it's still pathetic compared to the 345 computer from the UK that have hit on, over four times for a much smaller population that had a powerful, but ultimately secondary, part in shaping the outcome of the investigation.

The oddity is second place, steady and unwavering at about half of what the UK yields, and twice the US. Switzerland. A remarkable 180 computers connected, so far. I consider Mr. Bollier is there, founder of the comapny that made the Libyan timer that cracked the case, and a long-time Lockerbie info artist (mebocom pages). Bollier and his "Mission: Lockerbie" been a target of mine - not so much at this site, but previously - and yet has kindly plugged this site, asked to borrow my mountain picture and deigned to leave some comments. (as "ebol")

As a tech guy ultimately, I wonder if Bollier has got some clone army pumping up the hits for some reason. At Professor Robert Black's site, the Swiss hold a distant third (681 to USA's 2,144 and UK's 6,907). There's a deeper history there - many hundreds of those Americans probably viewed the page just once in late August '09. But still, Mebo is about all Switzerland's got connected to Lockerbie, and one way or another that has to be behind the special viewership slant for this site. I may not deliver the expected goods, since Mebo's ambiguous role has slid in importance as I learn more and more. But then I may still openly accuse him of handing over what became PT/35(b).

Mr Bollier, any comment?
(Note, Jan 26: I've since banned ebol from comments here, mostly for reasons over a decade old now).
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Update 5/10: Nearly 7000 page hits now. A few more nations have moved into two-view category. Pakistan suddenly shot from one to three views recently, Japan from two to five. Libya is still at 4. Top 12 at the moment: UK up to 496, expected to hit a landmark 500 later today. You guys are awesome! Switzerland, the ol' Confederation Helvetica, up to 382 now. Where do you keep coming from? USA, up to 187! Thanks to my fellow yanks! Recently a state-by-state breakdown came online, counting since then 6 Washington viewers (most of which I probably know), 5 each in California and New York, a few from several other states, and three "unknown." The rest: South Africa in fourth (90), Germany (85), Belgium (73), Malta in seventh (50). Netherlands (43), Canada (36), Australia (18), Austria/France (13), and Sweden (11).
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7/21: The hubbub this month about Megrahi supposedly having decades live and about evil BP having once lobbied for his release has caused a surge of news coverage in the United States, and with my frequent comments on stories, has earned the site a record run of new American viewers, my target audience. Current top 9: UK 716, Switz 631, USA 379, Germany 137, Belgium 122, SA 102, Netherlands 79, Canada 69, Malta 64. State-by-state: 36 of 50 states + DC, top 5: CA 47, NY 24, WA 14, VA 14, PA 13. Other high points: 72 nations total now. Recent first-time visitors: Luxembourg, Romania, Ecuador, Ukraine, Cyprus, Iran just the other day. Libya and Italy long since broke the matching pattern I noted earlier. Libya just passed India at 8 viewers.
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Aug 9: Slower then faster traffic lately. Continued worldwide media interest, getting more detailed as the anniversary of Megrahi's release approaches. Top 10 for distinct viewers: UK 868 Switz 727, US 444, Belgium passes Germany for 4th place, 144 to Germany's 142. 6 South Africa 111. 7 Netherlands, home of Camp Zeist, at 83. 8 Canada, 76. 9 Malta 66. 10 Spain, passing Australia (tied actually) at 36. India just passed Libya at 10 viewers. Hong Kong just appeared as its own country, giving me hits from 75 countries, with a total of 3,008 unique visitors. USA top four: CA 65, NY 30, WA 19, VA/PA 15.

Update Aug 18: Later in the day it became apparent August 9 was the site's record for new viewership. Based largely on my debate call to Brian Flynn (not taken up), a total of 47 new unique viewers logged in that day. My previous record was 36. 12 of these new viewers were American, and those have continued to come in thicker, now totaling well over 15% of visitors (had been about 14 before the 9th). US total = 499.

Update 13 September: It's been a good month for traffic. UK 1,168 Sw 851, US 598 Germany regains 4th, 166 to Belgium's 160 and South Africa's 136. Canada's taken a leap lately to 131, with Alberta (63 views!) leading the way over onetime clear leader Ontario (26). Neth 97, Malta 71, Aust'l 43, Sp 40, Aust 37, Fr 34 India 23, Sweden 22. Saudi Arabia took a one-day leap in late August from 2 to 9 viwers, now sitting at 10. 78 countries total, most recent: Nepal and Senegal. 3,821 unique visitors.

Update, 12 October: Blogger has added some new features, like an awesome comment-tracking tab, and a statistics one that show how many people from where are reading what posts within different time frames. Interestingly, the results there sometimes conflict with what flag counter says. I have viewers appearing from China, Venezuela, Latvia, and Moldova, nations that still appear as having no viewers at all by Flag Counter. Hong Kong and Taiwan appear, the former perhaps fudged by Blogger to read as China, which is what I'd expect, actually. But the other three are clearly their own countries, and it's a little strange. Currently 80 nations are recognized by Flag Counter, most recent Senegal, Mali, and Sri Lanka.

I've noticed on the stats amazing spikes of pageviews from my two South Korean vieweers (as high as I think 75 views in a two-hour span), and a 17-post rampage by my unacknowledged Moldovan guest. Hey, I'm down with the grape revolution, so long as it's authentic, man. (Sadly, I never did post my small research on that at Guerillas Without Guns, but there was a color revolution planned there too, called Grape.) Italy and Ireland's near-identical flags stay tied at 15. Slovenia, home of Bogomira Erac has now sent ten viewers - impressive for such a small place. Also, one of my favorite bands, Laibach, hails from there.

Australia, Malta, Netherlands, Belgium, and even the USA have made notable gains in viewing my big-head blog in recent weeks. Top ten: UK 1,444 - Switzerland 963 - US 723 - Belgium 188 - Germany 175 - Can 174 - South Africa 144 - Netherlands 115 - Malta 90 - Australia 55.

Nov 5: What the hell, Italy and Ireland? You both have the same exact flag, more or less, and get stuck side by side at 15 views for nearly two months. Then Italy pulls ahead to 16 the other day, leaving Poland between them. For one day. Then Ireland pulled up to 16 as well, and now they'll stay together for another month I suppose. Passed 5,000 unique visitors recently, now nearing 5,200. Macedonia and Sudan most recent viewers, nice climbing action from Poland (app 12 to 17) and Jordan (app 3 to 9). Canada keeps climbing, passing both Germany and Belgium comfortably. Top ten: UK 1,685 - Sw 1,064 - US 813 - Can 207 - Belg 205 - Ger 182 - SA 151 - Neth 126 - Malta 99 - Aust'l 63.

Jan 25 2011: A quick update after two month of watching but not noting. It's the one-year anniversary of the site, officially launched January 25 2010. The United States has improved its veiwership share to 16.1-16.3%. One day recently saw a new record, 16 new American viewers in a single day! Illinois in particular has taken off, now tied with Virginia for third place at 46 veiwers. (New York is comfortably past 100, and California's inching towards 300.) Top ten countries: UK 2359, Switz. 1472, US 1171, Canada 291, Belgium 258, Germany 238, Neth 216, SA 161, Malta 120, Australia 87. New countries: China, Iraq, Palestinian Territory, Algeria, Maldives, Bangladesh, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Uganda, Cambodia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Jamaica. Plus Guernsey and Jersey, which don't really seem like countries to me. Countries showing marked jumps include Austria, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Colombia. Italy and Ireland are tied again, as usual, at 26.
1/28 update: I was taunting Slovenia by putting the olive/gold threshold right above them, and they responded by shooting up from 23 to 32 viewers in less than three days, to 13th place. They'll be solid gold next update. Norway, home of many of my ancestors, also just jumped up a few slots to 17, from ... I thought it was seven just a month ago.

April 19 2011
Since the last update, Libya has entered into full on warfare with western elites giddy enough to solemnly demand Gaddafi's system finally be scrapped privatized for their own benefits. They don't say it that way, but it's clearly in store when so much is being spent on this "humanitarian" effort in such tough economic times. That we spend so much doesn't mean we care. It also costs a little money, some planning, and even caries risks ... to plan an armed robbery. The idea is it'll more than pay for itself.

Anyway, maybe it is for the best, but it annoys me how sure the world acts, when they can't even realize, at the very least, the Libyan government was framed for Lockerbie. It's been good and bad for my site. The war had Libya's internet cut off from late February, so new viewers stopped appearing. But the other day, April 16, I got my first new Libyan flag since then (21 now)! Sadly, it may be among the last ever with that cool green flag, as they're all hoping to take the flag of pre-Gaddafi Monarchist, serve Washington and Wall Street and starve-the-peasants-era Libya.

In other visitor news, the war drove record new viewers to my site, especially from the United States, always my intended core audience. 75 new computers logged on in one day on February 24, about 1/3 Americans. This helped the US later push to second place (1,833, 18.5% of total), bypassing Switzerland, whose new viewers rather suddenly slowed to a trickle. It was a nice break, but it coincided with a strange surge of Slovenian viewers, (just beginning at last update, only now slowing down a bit) from 13th at 32 viewers on Jan. 28, to 8th place at 187 in less than 3 months. Serbia's appeared and taken off some, too, but more naturally, now 15th at 56 viewers - an interest emerged there in my thru-linked article on the "al-Baida massacre" (see comments). New countries: Chile, Paraguay, Guadelupe, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, French Polynesia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovia, Croatia, Monenegro, (all of former Yugoslavia except Kosovo, the part we so excellently saved in '99) Syria (same issue - Syrian soldier also blamed for shooting their own for "refusing to shoot protesters."), Ghana, Mauritius, Botswana, Andorra. Top ten: UK 3,204 - US 1,833 - Sw 1,681 - Canada 397 - Belgium 321 - Germany 312 - Neth 277 - Slovenia 187 - S. Africa 171 - Australia/Malta (tied) 147. Malta will now leave the top ten. :(

Updated world veiwership map:

(New window for full view with points east)

previous, Jan 25:

Previous world map, Nov 2010

Current North America map:

Previous map, Jan 25

Previous map, Nov. 2010

Note California and Alberta, the deep red ones. I don't even know anyone there hardly, and they've got what seems like the overblown Switzerland effect going on. However, see comments below (by FullInquiry) on Alberta's showing. My own friends and family's what's got Washington between them as high as it is, sad as that is (40 views counted, with many others buried among the 150-ish U.S. views racked up before the state-by-state breakdown came online in May). I never expected a surge of Mexican interest, but after a full year ... 5 viewers?

Announcement: Crimes Against Reality in Libya

2011-04-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

March 29 2011
last update April 17 2011

I've been active in trying to keep figuring things out, just behind the scenes and off the subject of the Lockerbie case. Having developed an interest in Libya and its framing for that atrocity for mysterious but surely good reasons, I was bound to take a skeptical interest in the protests-turned-civil war unfolding there now.

Events are moving far too fast for me to keep up with my job and other pressures taking up so much time, but here, finally, I'm able to erect a "masterlist" for Crimes Against Reality in Libya, with three solid articles so far.

a series, Crimes Against Reality in Libya, hosted on my older blog The 12/7-9/11 Treadmill and Beyond. This site is dedicated to select alleged false flag operations and other mass-scale, usually war-related, state deceptions. It's the right place for these and the other mental bombshells I have half-planned.

An Iranian in London: The Strange Case of Parviz Taheri

2011-04-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

Helsinki Warning Re-Considered, pt 5
April 14 2011

The last installment in this series, many months ago, questioned whether Finnish Palestinian sad sack Samra Mahayoun actually placed the “Helsinki warning” phone call in December 1988. His record of prank calls from Finland about fake terror attacks might well have become known around, and so I speculated an Iranian caller, linked somehow to the plot against american air traffic, using Mahayoun’s phone line to launder their message about an upcoming airliner bombing.

Exactly why they would do this isn’t entirely obvious, but it’s worth thinking about. With the evidence now available and despite legal conventions, it’s fairly clear the plot that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 was Iranian in grievance, and executed with a certain known style of bomb. We can bet that this device was first loaded in London, rather than via the feeder flight 103A in Frankfurt as first decided, or Malta as set by 1990. If the call was a real warning of the real Flight 103 plot, it might specify London, but instead pointed to Frankfurt, from which the bomb they had readied would not have worked.

Aside from a non-informed hoax, simple misdirection from insiders is one possible explanation. It's the one I'll proceed on for now.

Named by the Defense
Another potential point of Frankfurt implication is an Iranian exile named Parviz Taheri, who already stands out for his own reasons, and may also have a link to that prophetic call (explained below). The resident of Sweden had an odd enough story to be named in 2000 by Megrahi’s defense team in their “special defense of incrimination.” He was one of a few alternate suspects in the narrative where Iranians – not Libyans - were behind planting the bomb. And it was inserted in London, not Malta.

Taheri was however called as a prosecution witness (number 996), which gave him immunity from any related charges. By the time of closing statements in January 2001, even the defense seemed to have abandoned trying to witness 996 to anything directly. Which isn’t to say there’s not a possible link, just that there wasn’t one the defense chose to put any weight on.

(fuller testimony excerpts, fascinating reading - source throughout for Taheri quotes)

Mitigating against Taheri’s involvement with the Iranian plot is his history, leaving little obvious room for sympathy with the Mullahs. He testified at the Lockerbie trial in Kurdish, having been born in Mashabad, Iranian Kurdistan. He “served in the Iranian army for two years,” he said (translated of course), “with six months training in arms and ammunition.” After this he became a teacher in the villages, and in 1983 came under suspicion of disloyalty and fled to Turkey. He arrived in Germany at the end of 1983, and moved to Frankfurt a year later.

On the other hand, this same fact would make Parviz an excellent “clean-skin” operative for a Tehran plot, hypothetically. He might be tacitly co-opted in any number or combination of ways, carrot or stick, or even maneuvered into helping unconsciously. The destruction of Iran Air 655 (IR655), the known motive for Iranin's known plot, was an unusual circumstance. Here, we cannot rule out even a long-estranged Kurd like Taheri being just as infuriated as anyone at the Yankee war crime. Nor can we rule out pressure against this diaspora Iranian in Frankfurt, Europe’s busiest air hub and the place their contractors would work on the weaponry for that revenge job (see below).

There’s certainly no obvious link so far, just a possible one I ask the reader to hold lightly in mind as we proceed.

A PFLP-GC Link?
In 1980s Frankfurt, Taheri worked at a “publishing house,” he testified, and “in the council of Frankfurt” (city council?). But he also sought out, in 1987 and ’88, store locations for more blue-collar work, with vague ambitions of selling newspapers, or running a catering or take-away business. One of the few dozen addresses he wrote down in a notebook was Sandweg 28. When asked about this at trial, he only said “I can't remember precisely where that is, but we looked for several places in Frankfurt, but I can't remember all the places.”

This exact piece of real estate was the same one chosen by the PFLP-GC, in September 1988, to house a terrorist cell, fronted with a catering business. This wasn’t any old group, but the very one, led by Hafez Dalkamouni, tasked with building the altimeter bombs to get revenge for IR655. The Sandweg address was for Dalkamouni's HQ, where a massive cache of weapons was held and many stayed. Marwan Khreesat built the actual airplane bombs at a separate flat in nearby Neuss. With Khreesat’s handiwork, the cell produced five altitude-senstive bombs before four of them were seized and the cell busted in late October. Many informed observers still believe the missing fifth device was used on Flight 103 two months later.

Taheri had popped out of country briefly at the time of the bombing (see below), but was intercepted on his return, Christmas day, by inspector Jurgen Fuhl of the federal Bundes Kriminal Amt (BKA). They met at the airport, and Fuhl found the notebook with the PFLP-GC address he recognized on the spot. At the 2000 trial he explained “I was aware that the same address was a place where weapons and explosives had previously been found.”

So, Mr. Taheri had the address of the PFLP-GC’s base HQ in West Germany, among others, written down in his personal papers. In itself, that doesn't prove anything, but ...

A Flight 103 Link to London
Where it gets strange is Mr. Taheri then carrying that notebook, with that address, on feeder flight Pan Am 103A on December 21, Frankfurt to London. This is the same plane that, officially, the bomb arrived in London inside of. He was sitting up top along with about 25% of the passengers who would carry on to the United States but die first. There are two somewhat different accounts of Taheri's boarding in Germany, the first emerging in this defense questioning of him:

Q ... When you checked in on the 21st of December of 1988 through Pan Am employee Irene Reijheus, did you tell her that you had visited London often and did not require a visa? It's a simple question, Mr. Taheri. Did you tell her?
A I can't remember if I had told anything to her, because I travel in a normal way. You just check in, and you show your documents if required.
...
Q Well, if Ms. Reijheus felt so alarmed by what she saw that she called up her colleague, Jasmine Sadiq, to help her with you ... If Ms. Sadiq, Jasmine Sadiq, who was also an employee of Pan Am, remembered seeing you at the check-in, and indicated that you looked very nervous, can you explain why she would have that view, if this was a perfectly normal check-in by you, Mr. Taheri?
A Yes. People usually get upset if they have a fight, but I was very happy and pleased. I was not upset at all, and I was looking forward to arrive to London to meet my friends and my future wife. There was no disturbance at all.

He apparently had his papers anyway, was allowed to fly, and at Heathrow parted ways with many co-passengers who would transfer to the trans-Atlantic 103. We can be sure that his luggage did not contain the explosive device, as he had no checked bags at all to carry on after him and rupture the luggage hold. That must be remembered as the red flags pile up. Nonetheless, at about the same time Taheri and his notebook were hailing a cab into London, a 30-minute Khreesat bomb made by that cell based on Sandweg was loaded beneath 259 people out on the tarmac.

Taheri returned to Frankfurt only on Christmas day, after a few days with his fiancee, there with her parents. He’d become engaged to her that year, and they all usually lived in Sweden. But for unclear reasons they were visiting the UK and Parviz was going to visit them there. And for this half-week family gathering he took no checked luggage, and only one small carry-on bag. That’s unusual, but it does help clarify, again, no matter how strange this gets, he did not check in the bomb suitcase.

And that becomes important when we see the different story emerging from Ms. Siddique’s own testimony.

An American Link?
Yasmin (Arabic and/or Persian for Jasmine) Siddique testified in November 2000, a month after Taheri. In December 1988 she was not, in fact, a Pan Am employee at all. She managed a McDonald’s restaurant, but was a Frankfurt-to-London passenger on 103A (she was going to visit her Mother). And she was standing just behind Taheri in the passport cue. Siddique still recalled noticing his behavior first – unsettled, apprehensive, turning his head frequently, eyes darting about as if watching for someone.

When he got up to “the passport man,” the suspicious young man was slow to produce the passport and the inspector was slower yet to examine it carefully. Taheri “did not look at the policeman or passport control officer;” she recalled, but rather, mostly, “at his feet.”

She was close enough to see his passport and “It was a small blue American passport.” She clarified this means issued by the United States, like the ones held by some of her family who already lived there at the time. Mr. Taylor then described the man this way:
Q Now, we know that the man that you have described was, in fact, a through passenger carrying on to the United States?
A Yes.
Q On a journey of seven hours and 40 minutes after [the 1.5-hour first leg]?
A Uh-huh.

But he got off in London, to meet his fiancée, he later said. This “fact” of full booking on the doomed half of the flight as well could be an inference from his US passport and the general impression that people return home at that time of year, as she was. There was nothing else read out (that I can find) showing this booking, but Taylor and Siddique somehow agreed it was the case. She thought he carried no luggage at all as he stood in line, and found it odd considering the long flight ahead.

Either way, the American passport is unexpected and not explained by anything else I know of. He lived in Germany and, sometime in 1989, move to Sweden, where inspector Fuhl had to hunt him down for further questioning. (Oddly, alternate suspects Mohammed Abu Talb and Abu Elias both have links in Sweden as well). Taheri was still a resident of Sweden when he testified.

A Helsinki Link, Phone Work?
The Guardians of the Islamic Revolution placed a call from London later the evening of the 21st claiming responsibility for the bombing. "We, the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, are undertaking this heroic execution in revenge of blowing the Iran Air plane by America a few months ago." It was considered the most credible claim to the CIA in those first days [see here], and absent any Libyan admission ever, remains the most credible to this day.

There’s no particular reason to suspect Taheri of links to the Guardians, or of placing that call, other than the previous clues, the musing below, and that he was a Iranian in London at the right time.

But what if Taheri had a history of phone calls related to the 103 bombing? Like the Helsinki warning? It can be inferred from the following defense questioning that he said a very peculiar thing to Inspector Fuhl somewhat to that effect and worse. He knew nothing of the bombing, he had said, but one might find answers by calling Iranians, at an embassy, in Helsinki.

Q Now, I think the West German police said to you that if you were not involved in the tragedy that happened to Pan Am 103, did you, with your connections, have any idea who might be involved; is that right? They asked you that question?
A Yes, it is correct.
Q And you told them to look somewhere in particular, didn't you?
A I don't know what you are referring to.
Q Well, let's see if I can jog your memory. Did you direct their attention to the Iranian embassy in Helsinki?
A No, I haven't contacted Iranian embassy at all. I had been to Helsinki just as a tourist. [...] I was not asked about the Iranian embassy in Helsinki by the German police, but they only asked my point of view regarding that incident. And I said I don't know.
Q My Lord, that's all I ask.

He later denied saying that, but it seems at one point he made this ominous reference and still admits being there (in case there was supporting evidence?). But this was only as a tourist, not as the guy who broke into Samra Mahayoun’s flat and seeded that strangely prophetic warning about the bombing of an American flight from Frankfurt two weeks later. Because two weeks later, by chance, Taheri himself flew on an American flight from Frankfurt which then blew up.

Inspector Fuhl, questioned by Davidson, on what Taheri said about the bombing:

Q Do you recall him telling you where you might look for further information on that matter?
A I can't remember him giving me information about where I could look further. [...] If I can jog your memory, could he have mentioned to you an embassy in Helsinki in Finland?
A It's possible.
Q In particular, the Iranian embassy in Helsinki?
A I can't remember the details any more. The whole thing is, after all, 12 years ago. [...] It must all be in the paperwork.

So we have here no physical connection to the bomb, but an amazing shadowing of it that can only possibly be sheer coincidence. In fact, it reeks of coordination, lack of pay stubs notwithstanding.

To be sure, carrying such a clue as the Sandweg address, if it were operational information and he was knowingly on a related flight, would be a major blunder. But it’s also possible that was the point: Taheri's Iranian origins and the flight he was on, his needless odd behavior, the address, and this Helsinki hinting, collectively suggest an attempt to appear involved rather than actually being (physically) involved. The strange case of Parviz Taheri looks a hell of a lot like a sort of a lightning rod or decoy operation.

My next notion that he might have been involved with the "hoax" call follows on the above points, and on their shared effect. Both aimed to keep attention on weird things out of Frankfurt, as opposed to the concise operation set for Heathrow airside. And both carry clues so parallel to the reality as to be chilling, yet are in actuality inaccurate, misleading, and potentially (officially, of course) pure coincidence. Again.

Once Upon a Time, there was Lockerbie

2011-04-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

Spot the Problem
By Robert Forrester,
Secretary, Justice For Megrahi Campaign
Special to The Lockerbie Divide
March 28 2011

In 1958 President Eisenhower was so concerned about the prevailing hatred for the United States amongst the peoples of the Middle East that he commissioned a report in the hope that better minds than his could explain what seemed to have flummoxed him. In 1953, Eisenhower, supported by Churchill and later Eden, sanctioned Operation Ajax. Operation Ajax was regime change at its cheapest and most effective. It cost a mere $1,000,000 to run, involved buying off the Iranian military and employing gangs of Teherani thugs to create civil disorder and achieved its desired result of overthrowing the popular Iranian prime minister Mohamed Moussadeq. Why did he do this? Because Moussadeq was showing unfortunate socialist tendencies whilst at the same time as sitting on some rather desirable oil supplies. In fact, the man actually had the gall to suggest that Iran should be controlling its own mineral wealth and selling at prices the Iranian people felt appropriate, not those which the UK and USA felt like paying. Happily, everything went according to plan. Moussadeq ended up under house arrest for the rest of his days, the Iranians were subjected to thirty years of murder, torture and political repression by the West’s man of the hour, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and we got the fuel to fund our casino economies at our prices, at least until Ayatollah Khomeini flew home to roost. Eisenhower’s National Security Council, in its report to the president, explained that the people of the Middle East seemed to have run away with the bizarre notion that the US is only interested in supporting tyrannical despots in their region who are willing provide cheap mineral resources. It is tempting to ponder whether Eisenhower’s illuminating report cost more than Operation Ajax.

Saddam Hussein proved to be a tad more awkward to deal with however. But once he had gone past his sell by date (he never did manage to club those dashed mullahs over the border despite all the help we gave him), and despite the weaponry we’d supplied him with, he really didn’t stand a chance. All that was needed was to await a convenient source of outrage, in his case the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre, to creatively stitch him into, trample all over the UN, then let him have it. Abracadabra. Ignoring the appalling cost in lives, a country that was once an example to the region in terms of its social services and state run enterprises was bombed back into surviving in open sewers. But hey, they got democracy, plus, the oil was free again, just like the 1920s.

So now it’s Libya’s turn. Gaddafi stands even less of a chance than Saddam. It’s hard to imagine the bookies taking bets on anything other than the precise hour and minute of when the rope will go round his neck. How can the rebels lose? They have copious amounts of the very best that modern air power, intelligence gathering and command and control can provide taking out any and all opposition they would otherwise have fallen victim to. They simply have to pick up the pieces, follow the instructions and keep shambling on towards Tripoli. Neither the Chinese nor the Russians have shown any real signs of stepping in. Even the US has estimated that it really doesn’t need to take such a prominent role in affairs and handed it all on to NATO. In any case, the US already has enough on it’s plate what with commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, whilst at the same time having to keep a weather eye on other developments in the region: not least on the fact that Syria is getting a little frayed round the edges, and, although Israel is doubtless smiling, it won’t be sleeping. Furthermore, oil is marginally less of a lure to the States where Libya is concerned. Not so however with the UK. Let’s not forget Tony Blair’s ‘Deal in the Desert’, the BP contract and all the embarrassing mud that is sticking over the revelations that have come out concerning Gordon Brown’s government’s attempts to help Tripoli negotiate the legal hurdles of Mr al-Megrahi’s repatriation.

Despite the distress caused to anyone directly connected to the Pan Am 103 incident,
it almost seems wrong to draw a spotlight on to the Lockerbie/Zeist case at a time when Libya is being torn apart by civil war. Nevertheless, David Cameron has chosen to do just that recently in seeking to justify his belligerence by saying of Muammar al-Gaddafi: "The people of Lockerbie know what this man is capable of." (David Cameron - 21/3/2011). Justice Secretary Ken Clark is also now playing the Lockerbie card by saying that we have to bring Gaddafi down to prevent him from seeking another Lockerbie in revenge for the UK’s support of the rebels.

It is always much healthier if you can draw on some moral high ground to justify your cause in the public eye. We tried it on in Afghanistan with how we were lifting the Afghans out of their feudal political system by waving our magic wand of democracy over them. Now, with Libya, it is Lockerbie and terrorism. Ever since Libya’s ex justice minister, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, set himself up as leader of Eastern Libya in February with claims that he had proof that Gaddafi was behind Lockerbie, this has provided the opportunity to indulge in a bit of sleight of hand and massaging of public opinion. Lockerbie combines public ignorance, terrorism, fear and righteousness, and, it sells papers into the bargain. Abdel-Jalil’s claims are simply that, claims. After a month, he has yet to produce one iota of substance. Is he saying that he was negligent enough to leave the documents back in Tripoli? Once Tripoli falls and no documents are produced, are we then going to hear that Gaddafi must have destroyed them? Perhaps though, documents will be produced, however, we all know what is said about truth and the fog of war. Even today, and despite the payments the Telegraph had to make to George Galloway concerning the documents that were allegedly found in Baghdad proving his complicity with Saddam’s government, their origin is still not settled. In any case, it surely comes as no surprise to anyone that Gaddafi would have been behind an action such as Lockerbie if one of his countrymen had carried it out. But, did Abdelbaset al-Megrahi do it? Therein lies the rub.

To say that the case against Mr al-Megrahi has one or two problems would be arch understatement.

There was a break in to Heathrow airside giving access to Pan Am 103’s loading bay area shortly before take off. This incident was reported to the Heathrow authorities at the time but not made public until after the verdict was passed twelve years later.
There is no evidence of any unaccompanied luggage leaving on flight KM180 from Malta’s Luqa airport.
There are question marks over the provenance of documentary evidence provided by Frankfurt Airport ( the transit point from Luqa to Heathrow).
Along with other alleged inducements, the Crown’s star witness, Mr Tony Gauci (the proprietor of a Maltese clothes outlet) and his brother, Paul, are accused of having been in receipt of payments of $2,000.000 and $1,000,000 respectively under an American rewards for justice scheme for their testimony (a practice understandably alien to Scots Law, and presumably sufficient to dismiss both Tony and Paul Gauci as witnesses. The US authorities have yet to deny this deal). Tony Gauci’s testimony falls considerably short of being conclusive in terms of his eye witness account, which attempts to match up the identity of the purchaser of clothes from his shop, on account of key discrepancies with regard to the date of the purchase and the height, weight, age and build of the purchaser. Even though he had been prompted by numerous photo spreads containing pictures of Mr al-Megrahi and privy to media photographs of the accused prior to the trial, Mr Gauci could do little better than say that the man in the dock “resembled” the purchaser of the clothes.
Serious doubts also arise over the provenance of the fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of a triggering device for a bomb which brought down pan Am 103. How did it (along with a sample of Mr Gauci’s clothes) survive temperatures of around 4,000ºC at the heart of a Semtex explosion? Why was it not tested for explosive residue? Why was forensic testimony accepted from representatives of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE), who had in previous terrorist trials been pilloried for the nature and standard of their testimony? Why were alterations to the discrepancies in the notebooks of the RARDE forensic witnesses not made more of in the trial? Why was the fact that a Crown witness, Mr Ulrich Lumpert, signed a sworn affidavit in 2007 retracting his Zeist testimony relating to the fragment of circuit board as effectively being a pack of lies not pursued? Why was the fragment sent to the US and allowed to leave Scottish jurisdiction, surely this would disqualify it as evidence?
Suspicions are also rife concerning what influence the FBI and the US Department of Justice had over the Scottish led police investigation and the trial under the auspices of the High Court of Justiciary.

The above simply serve to illustrate some of the more prominent worries over the safety of the conviction. To compound this, the judges chose to believe a tale of how the bombing was carried out that defies what any normal person could accept as credible, namely: that Mr al-Megrahi contrived to place an unaccompanied luggage item on to flight KM180 from Malta which was then subsequently transferred at Frankfurt to a feeder flight to Heathrow, again unaccompanied, where it was finally loaded on to Pan Am 103, unaccompanied. Thus defying three security regimes in three separate countries, and the bomb still managed to blow up its target and not either one of the first two flights despite the inevitability of delays etc which would have been par for the course around Christmas time. It is truly hard to believe that 15 lay Scottish jurors could reach anything other than a not guilty verdict in such circumstances. Although impeccably qualified as judges, their Lordships, MacLean, Sutherland and Coulsfield, in arriving at their guilty verdict, displayed an absence of experience when it comes to the role of being a juror. Indeed to give credence at all to the story of the Luqa-Frankfurt-Heathrow connection, especially as it was presented at Zeist, demonstrates a complete inability to imagine how paramilitaries operate.

It also cannot be ignored that the structure of trial itself could well have contributed to the conviction in that the Crown played the role of prosecutor, judge and jury. The litany goes on.

Mr al-Megrahi’s first appeal failed, this is true. However, in their judgement, the judges were at pains to point out that they took no account of the sufficiency of evidence since the defence did not require them to do so. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) then referred the case back to the Court of Appeal on six grounds suggesting that no reasonable court would have reached a guilty verdict on the basis of the evidence laid before the Crown by the prosecution. This appeal was then, unnecessarily, dropped by Mr al-Megrahi in his attempt to gain compassionate release. There has been much speculation regarding the possibility that he may have come under pressure to do so even though the terms of compassionate release do not require an appeal to be dropped to become a beneficiary of it. The long and the short of it is, therefore, that this conviction has not yet been fully tested in law in the interests of justice. The best that the Crown, in the form of the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, has been able to offer as a counter to these concerns is a mind-boggling merry-go-round of circular polemic which amounts to little more than: he was convicted, therefore, he did it. So parlous are the arguments offered up by the Crown that one almost feels bound to ask what qualifications are required for the job of Lord Advocate. To reassure us all that the Crown and the police are still taking the Lockerbie Zeist affair seriously though, even at a point ten years after the conviction, Angiolini also claims that the Dumfries and Galloway police are conducting an on-going review of the investigation. It, in fact, transpires that this is being carried out by one sole officer. In the words of Christine Grahame MSP, this constitutes little better than “file management.”

Recently, on Auntie Beebs weekly vox pop mainstay, Question Time (broadcast from Edinburgh on the 10th of March) we were again treated to the predictable and tedious question of how Mr al-Megrahi must be laughing now that he is back in Libya. I imagine the member of the public who posed the question will be reduced to stitches if he ever contracts a malignant carcinoma. In order to kick the SNP bashing off, Douglas Alexander was straight in with claims that Mr al-Megrahi was currently being chauffeured around Tripoli in a Lamborghini (presumably to make him a more awkward target for the coalition missiles). Annabel Goldie took the biscuit though in bemoaning the damage that the compassionate release had done to the good name of Scottish justice, completely ignoring the profound and legitimate concerns over the safety of the conviction. Clearly, a potential miscarriage of justice does no harm at all.

There are of course differences between the histories of Iran and Libya, however, the salient threads of Western foreign policy run through both. In the case of Libya, we have the Italian genocide of the late 20s and early 30s (accounting for upwards of 50,000 deaths in camps), the Second World War, and then a monarchy (supported by Italy, the UK and the US) that pocketed Libya’s wealth until overthrown by Gaddafi. Much like Khomeini was viewed later in Iran, Gaddafi was seen in the late 60s as someone who would stand up to Western depredations. The surprising thing is that he managed to survive being a thorn in the side of the West for as long as he has: Reagan’s bombs, sanctions and all the rest. In pitting himself against such power, he, of course, subjected his people to his own brand of Gestapo for decades. Ex justice minister Abdel-Jalil’s claims, therefore, should be seen in this light. Anyone who managed to negotiate the perils to attain such a position under such a tyrannical regime is bound to have washed his hands in the people’s blood on a fairly regular basis. To that extent he doubtless has every reason to make the types of claims he is making in the hope of protecting his own skin.

It is hard to see Gaddafi going anywhere now except to follow Saddam to the gallows. The West will do what it knows best and install someone who is suitably on message until the oil runs out. Who knows what may become of Mr al-Megrahi? A one way ticket to the US’s Guantánamo rest home perhaps? Whatever transpires, it will make no difference to the case being put before the Scottish parliament by justice campaigners. No amount of dissembling mendacity claimed by politicians and others can ever change the documented historical fact of what took place at Zeist. This conviction simply does not stack up, no matter how good your gas mask.

Germans link Heathrow with Lockerbie bomb

2011-04-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

... back in '89
The Scots-German War over Airport Security, part 3 of 2 (addendum)
April 5 2011

Below is an article I would have found important in the two-parts of the Scots-German War over Airport Security (part one), but only heard of it later. Props to Patrick Haseldine mentioning it, and to "Buncrana" for finding me the article. It's not factually acurate in the numbers-based finer points, which I've flagged in red, with corrections in [brackets]. But the general idea is still spot on, and his background facts are as accurate as any account I've read. Barring the Bedford suitcase story (apparently unknown to the world until David Leppard's 1991 book) and the Heathrow break-in (unknown 'til Ray Manly's revelation in 2001), the 38 minute "coincidence" referred to here, with a different number of minutes, is the best evidence to call on for a London origin for the bomb. Hat's off to Mr. Pallister for an excellent article from the archives
---
Germans link Heathrow with Lockerbie bomb
By DAVID PALLISTER

The Guardian (London)

November 9, 1989

WEST German forensic experts have discovered evidence which suggests that the bomb which brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie last December could have been loaded at Heathrow.
The evidence comes from an examination of three other bombs made by the Palestinian group believed to be responsible for the attack. It casts serious doubt on the theory that the bomb was placed on an earlier connecting flight.

All three devices were identically constructed, with electronic timers set to detonate the Semtex explosive within 43 to 46 minutes of being activated by a barometric pressure trigger at about 3,000 feet. [see more correct version here - each one was different] The West German police believe they were destined for El Al planes or flights to Tel Aviv.

If the Lockerbie bomb was the same, it would have had to have been placed on board the jumbo at Heathrow, rather than at Frankfurt, Malta or Cyprus - the three possibilities so far publicly canvassed.

The bombs have been connected with the terrorist cell run in West Germany by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The first was found in October 1988 in a radio cassette player in a car driven by Hafez Dalkamoni, who has been identified as a senior member of the PFLP-GC. He is awaiting trial in Frankfurt for a bomb attack on a railway in Lower Saxony in August 1987.

The discovery of the cassette bomb led to warnings from the West Germans to airlines and other western governments in November.

In April this year West German police found three more devices in the basement of a house owned by one of Dalkamoni's relatives in the town of Neuss. One exploded at the Wiesbaden headquarters of the BKA, the federal criminal investigation agency, killing a bomb disposal expert.

The three unexploded devices were all made by the same man. The BKA thinks he was the man arrested with Dalkamoni, Marwan Khreesat, who was mysteriously released without charge two weeks later, along with 12 other Palestinians arrested in October. Khreesat, it has been alleged, was probably an agent working for either Jordanian or West German intelligence, or both.
[all correct, but the fifth device is unmentioned]

The forensic experts, working for the BKA, believe the devices were designed to withstand examination by El Al's pressure chambers which are used to screen baggage.

Dr Jim Swire, the spokesman for the UK Families-Flight 103 group, believes the findings could point to the Lockerbie bomb, which was also in a cassette player, being loaded at Heathrow.

The plane took off at 6.25pm and disappeared off the radar screens between 53 and 54 minutes later [38 minutes later, of course, at 7:03]. It takes between seven and 10 minutes to climb to 3,000 feet [I have about 7 minutes and 2,400 feet - see again this link], which fits in precisely with the timing system on the other bombs. [it would fit perfectly if it were a 30-minute timer, which was among those used - 30, 45, and 60 minutes. see again this link.]
---

Terrorists 1 and 2! Ah, I see you’ve met!

2011-03-21T05:27:00.000-07:00

Reflections on the Libya conflict, Gaddafi, bin Laden, and their shared history
March 21
edits March 22

Note: I only come across as so totaly pro-Gaddafi in the sense of shouting what others won't even whisper. I mean to excuse no atrocity or abuse by Gaddafi's regime that is real and unwarranted in the circumstances. I only seek to add just this, below, to the global discussion on the Libya conflict.
---
Paul Hudson, father of a Lockerbie victim and co-president of the Families of Pan Am 103/Lockerbie – a separate group from Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc. - posted a press release about a week ago, on the eve of the UN vote about a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s a pretty militant dispatch filled with minor inaccuracies (Libya was not on Bush's “axis of evil,” for one) and the usual annoying spin the U.S. family members of 103 victims are so well-known for. Something about believing that their children were killed by Gaddafi’s regime might have something to do with that.

As others have been doing, he seems to believe every report from the rebel side and hears none from the other, and falls back on alarmist tactics to urge sterner measures against the Gaddafi regime. He called for immediate military strikes and recognition of the new government in Benghazi, to prevent a “genocide” against the “peaceful protesters.” Out inaction in this war has the danger of "starting a war," he cautioned.

Hudson’s advice and the thousands who share the same view has apparently made it happen. The United States, UK, and France pushed through a 10-0 vote at the United Nations security council on the imposition of an enforced no-fly zone. And it has just-now-noticed additions specifying Gaddafi’s forces can also not drive tanks, or do anything ground based that threatens “civilian targets.” The meaning of civilian is unclear; it seems by the news reports of actions taken so far to include protesters, and also the half of Libya now under rebel control, and also their advancing forces. Witness the famously photographed rebel fighter jet shot down over Benghazi. Officially (by rebel accounts) this was shot down by Gaddafi's forces, who were close enough to both shoot it and to be threatened by it. They were guilty of breaking the cease-fire, an unprecedented one-sided one, with an open-ended military license to back it up, in the middle of a rather sudden mass defection and war that is not clearly understood by most people (myself included).

Clearly what’s needed is to rush into this fray before we can figure out what the hell’s going on there. Make no mistake, supporting the protesters is an urgent and a humanitarian impulse, we’re told by the US ambassador to the UN: "the violence must stop, the killing must stop, and the people of Libya must be protected and have the opportunity to express themselves freely." And as a French government spokesman clarified, the “free expression” referred to is "go(ing) all the way in their drive for freedom, which means bringing down the Kadhafi regime." [source]

What a novel concept, sure to be introduced here or there, in the heartlands of revolutionary enlightenment freedom themselves. Following this overseas trial run, of course. Or perhaps not.

It's not an entirely savory bunch we are going in to protect, either. There are the deep-east-Libyan Arab racists among them, identifying African “mercenaries” often just by skin color, venting their dislike of Gaddafi’s pan-African ideas by cutting down immigrant workers and lifetime citizens alike in the dozens, according to a number of reports. [see here and here] Many others escaped such harm only by fleeing quickly enough.

But then there’s Daffy Qadhafi’s loony charge that al Qaeda, its north African branch at least, is behind the revolt. He said this from the beginning, to a general response in the west of hysterical laughter. As impassioned commentator David Rothscum aptly put it “ we consider him to be a schizophrenic autistic nutcase of course.” It doesn't help that he added that they were tripping on hallucinogens, of course, in a surreal and contradictory twist.

Again on the eve of serious bombardment, Gaddafi tried to explain to the world: "If you come here to carry out air strikes, you are not coming to protect the human rights of civilians, you are... going to be opening the door to al Qaeda." Strangely, as President Obama orders missiles, his anti-terrorism Czar John Brennan, for one, concedes there is cause for just that concern, as with any Muslim nation being destabilized. Or perhaps more so. Early on in the Libyan uprising, it was reported on CNN and elsewhere that Al Qaeda's North African wing offered through a website to "do whatever we can to help" the rebels. This tends to go against Gaddafi's idea they had initiated the revolt. But just now, they've issued a "warning against America" to the rebels of their stripe.

Brennan was however all but sure of renewed terrorism if Gaddafi remains. Indeed, he might be more angry, for some reason, and so must go, opening the door for someone. And clearly Gaddafi’s death machine and bin Laden’s are in the same group to Americans and the French – Arabic speaking airliner-scale terrorist bad guys, and the worst two among them. As Mr. Hudson noted

"[Gaddafi is] the admitted No. 2 international terrorist, second only to Osama Bin Laden, having caused the murder of hundreds of Americans, French, UK and other innocent citizens in the bombings of U.S. bound Pan Am 103 killing 270, UTA flight 772 killing 170, the La Belle Disco bombing in Berlin, dozens of other terrorist attacks, and delivering large shipments of plastic explosives for IRA terrorist bombings, plus killing thousands of his own people who regularly disappear into his torture chambers or are assassinated abroad. (...)

I’m confident some portion of that list is true, but at the very least the deadliest among them and the one that brought Mr. Hudson into such impartial and scholarly contact with this ring of terror, has been sadly misattributed. (see: the rest of this site).

The two Libyan agents accused of bombing Flight 103, Abdelbaset al Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah, were indicted in 1991 on flimsy and dubious evidence. Of three witnesses against the accused, at least two were paid $2 million each, and still managed to provide almost zero credible evidence between them. The trial judges themselves in 2000 dismissed one of them, the star witness Giaka, for likely mass-fabrication, and acquitted the accomplice, convicting Megrahi alone for a crime he couldn't do alone. This itself was decided on reasoning seriously questioned on official review in 2007. Gaddafi and Libya never did "admit" to this crime, this alleged Libyan plot on Malta. There’s also much better circumstantial evidence and a truckload of cover-up indicators pointing elsewhere.

Nonetheless, back in the early 1990s, the politically leveraged indictments led into demands for a trial Libya couldn’t agree to, leading to a UN air embargo and steep sanctions. These caused an unknown number – reportedly thousands - of preventable Libyan deaths, possibly included in Mr. Hudson’s numbers as Gaddafi’s fault. This only ended after the two accused surrendered for a compromise trial in 1999. Mr. Hudson noted an agreement to limit the trial’s fallout, unjustly he thinks.

Prior to turnover of the Pan Am 103 indicted terrorists for trial, a letter by former UN Secretary Kofi Annan stated that the U.S. and UK had agreed not to pursue the case so as to destabilize the Gaddafi regime.

Yes, political assassination was a genuine concern, as that was likely the US and UK goal in framing and pursuing the two Libyan agents. And this wasn’t the only thing the Anglo-American alliance has used to destabilize or kill the colonel. Cruise missile accidentally hit his house in 1986, killing a a bay daughter of his. Another thisng once used, a decade later, was the no. 1 terrorist on Hudson’s list – Osama bin Laden and his once obscure al Qaeda network.

David Shayler is our troublesome source for this, a former MI5 officer, who is now certifiably nuts. But this 2002 article by Martin Bright in the UK Guardian makes quite clear that he had at least one dynamite conspiracy find earlier on: the UK MI6 (foreign intelligence) worked in the mid-1990s with al Qaeda's north African network, in Libya, on a plot to assassinate Gaddafi. The cell there, called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), included one Anas al-Liby ("the Libyan"), a fairly senior member close to bin Laden in his days in Sudan. As Bright explained the LIFG's bold and British-sponsored move:

The assassination attempt on Gadaffi was planned for early 1996 in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte. It is thought that an operation by the Islamic Fighting Group in the city was foiled in March 1996 and in the gun battle that followed several militants were killed. In 1998, the Libyans released TV footage of a 1996 grenade attack on Gadaffi that they claimed had been carried out by a British agent.

The west played that down, and the escaped British agent al-Liby took part in the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. For this he was indicted in 2000 and fled, from asylum in the UK (Manchester). With a $25 million bounty on his head, he wound up in the Afghanistan area, joining the post-9/11 Jihad.

Shayler was on trial for revealing some genuine secret or other (I'm unclear what), and his explanation of why, this Libya plot he had to expose, was called “pure fantasy” by the government. But during the trial amazing lengths were gone to to keep it all quiet. Public Interest Immunity certificates were issued, Mr. Shayler was barred from saying or entering anything about it, the media was gagged from reporting on it, and so on. The article explained:

Astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative, al-Liby was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. The raid discovered a 180-page al-Qaeda 'manual for jihad' containing instructions for terrorist attacks.

The MI6 officer who ran this fiasco were named, but thought to be relocated and re-named by then. The operation is said to have hampered Libya's efforts to arrest Osama himself, or take a hard-line against his nascent network. Indeed, Muammar Gaddafi's terrorist regime was the first in the world, in May 1998, to declare bin Laden a wanted criminal. Shayler had insisted it, and supporting evidence came out in the 2002 book Forbidden Truth by Dasquie and Brisard. Thus, the West's obsession with Gaddafi could have had some role in allowing the attacks of September 11, 2001 and others, before and since.

Al-Liby remained in the fight until he was killed in Pakistan, in 2008. But some of his affiliates remained in Libya, mostly the heavily Islamist western half that now, it's proudly boasted, "has never accepted Gaddafi's rule." In fact, he's sometimes referred to there, perhaps literally, as the "anti-Christ." Many eastern citizens were crushed following the 1996 plot, in a harsh crackdown that saw record executions in excess of 1,000.

The government has taken a different tone on the LIFG today, a softer one, to respect international criticism of human rights abuses. Now they are "rehabilitating" the terrorists rather than executing as before. Nonetheless, as reported, "the LIFG in 2007 reaffirmed its determination to topple Kadhafi's regime and to replace it with an Islamic state, and also stated its affiliation to Al-Qaeda."

Under these peoples' influence, parts of neglected western Libya have spawned at least two things of note in the last decade. One is the highest rate of al Qaeda volunteers, per capita, in the Arab world, and now the mutiny against Gaddafi. A further 110 rehabilitated LIFG members were released, as scheduled, a day before the planned "day of rage" that started the revolt in February. And now, some of al-Liby's offspring are, or had better be, planning a coalition government over Africa’s largest oil deposits, if they are to replace a long-despised “terrorist” regime. Or just hold onto what the allies up north seem to think they have a right to.

Now of course, all the rebels are not al Qaeda fanatics, but just how many are is unclear. As David Wood reported for the Huffington Post:

U.S. officials declined to discuss the make-up of the anti-Gaddafi forces in eastern Libya, and U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment publicly.

It’s presumably hoped that the "undesirable elements" will be co-opted or weeded out one way or another after things have settled and freedom is realized.

And similarly, not all of the protesters we're protecting are war criminals. But some apparently are. An amateur video (view with discretion) shows rows of dead Libyan soldiers "who refused to obey orders to shoot their fellow Libyans and they were executed by the regime and its mercenaries.” it was the major incident you heard about, the one near al-Baida, where 130 of Gaddafi's soldiers were killed somehow, surely added to the figures against him, and claimed by the rebels as a platoon of martyrs for their freedom fight. Refusing orders to kill innocents, faces blown off. The world was moved.

But another video, shown on Libyan state TV from footage intercepted somehow, shows a number of the same soldiers (apparently, by clothing, build, etc.) and their captors before the killing. From that it seems the rebels themselves themselves blew the heads off of these helpless prisoners, and passed off the edited cut to an accepting world * as another predictable Gaddafi slaughter. Or we have to give the regime very high marks for rapid and convincing video fakery. (Please see the explanation of this at my favorite skeptics forum).

Well, now with some help from northerners, seizing the sky again from a murderous tyrant, the rebels might have the whole regime on its way to being just as bound and helpless as those claimed “martyrs” near al-Baida. Amid the pools of blood at slaughter's end, we’ll hear the explanation – as usual, it was all Gaddafi’s fault. The world will cheer for the freedom fighters. And then some other things will happen, who knows what.

* (Previously I’d noted here the alleged work of the extra-brutal Palestinian terror group PFLP-GC in Bosnia, fighting alongside proto-al Qaeda elements for Bosnian freedom from Serbian rule. Starting in May 1992, some of these terrorist elements reportedly killed civilians and conducted other false flag atrocities blamed on Serb forces and used to help win NATO air support to protect human rights. [source] It is my belief that the PFLP-GC also organized or at least equipped the murder of Mr. Hudson’s daughter in 1988, despite Libya taking the blame.)

Libya's "Admissions of Guilt"

2011-03-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

By Caustic Logic
completed February 15 2010
last update March 23 2011

But They Admitted It!"
For those who believe in Libya's guilt for the Flight 103 bombing, among the hardest points to get around is how Libya is perceived to have admitted their guilt. When whole governments act on it as fact, and the villain government finally confesses, well that would seem to confirm one's beliefs and show they had been on the right track all along.

It's a reasonably reasonable conclusion to arrive at, but a lazy one based on reading the headlines and not the main text or the footnotes and sources. Those who would like to maintain such assurances should read and be sure they can account for the following points, referring to the 2003 official admission of "responsibility" to the United Nations, an alleged 1993 confession from Colonel Gaddafi himself, and two other lesser examples sometimes cited.

Under Prolonged Duress
Following he indictment of Libyan agents al Megrahi and Fhimah in late 1991, the UN Security Council under Anglo-American leadership moved to enforce the official truth with sanctions. Resolution 748 of 31 March 1992 imposed an arms and air embargo on Libya, supported with diplomatic restrictions, and establishment of a sanctions committee. The committee’s work then led to Resolution 883 of 11 November 1993, toughening sanctions. This measure “approved the freezing of Libyan funds and financial resources in other countries,” reports globalpolicy.org, “and banned the provision to Libya of equipment for oil refining and transportation.” [1] Eventually all air traffic to and from the nation was barred, all U.S. and French trade with Libya was forbidden, and although a total oil exports embargo was considered too hard on others, their sales shrank as the industry suffered a lack of supplies.

An award of up to $4 million was offered by the US Justice Department in 1993 for help in bringing the suspects to justice (poster at left). It seems this reward stemmed from Bruce Smith, a Pan Am pilot and husband of a 103 victim, who first assembled a prize from airline pilot groups and other sources, including his own retirement account, eventually totaling $4 million. [2] The reward was renewed in 1995, and according to the Washington Post:

"[The FBI] also placed the pair, believed to be in Libya, on its 10 Most Wanted List. Seeking to rekindle international interest in the bombing, the FBI and State Department said they will work with the U.S. Information Agency to communicate with persons in Libya who might assist in bringing the suspects to court." [3]

Col. Gaddafi in fact showed great eagerness to help in that process, seeing a trial as their way out of sanctions, just as the (publicly announced) goal was suppossed to be. But as a 2001 book by Allan Gerson and Jerry Adler summed up the real thinking in Washington, "it was desirable to leave things just as they were," with Libya seeming intransigent and thus deserving of more squueezing. Rather than try thhe perpetrators with their amazing evidence, many felt "Libya would be their prison, and the United States would do its best to keep Kaddafi in there with them." Not to mention the Libyan people who also lived under these long-running punishments. And never mind the families of Flight 103's victims, who wanted to get what they percieved as justice. But this was never an open policy - the sanctions were an unfortunate effect of Tripoli's refusal to comply with terms the book says "appear to have been chosen to make it as difficult as possible for Kaddafi to comply." [4]

In October 1995, Libyan officials cited a "tragic toll" from sanctions, a $19 billion dollar wound damaging their agricultural sector significantly, and causing as many as 21,000 preventable deaths since their inception. [4.5] Such reports might be prone to exaggeration, but others started wondering if there were any deaths what the sanctions were about when the Libyans were ready to deal. Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, even Tony Blair started suggesting a little flexibility. Perhaps a trial of the suspects really would be doable outside the United States.

By late August 1998 the framework of a trial was established, and used as the measure of Resolution 1192, agreeing to suspend sanctions once the suspects were handed over to the special Scottish court in the Nehterlands at Camp Zeist. Tripoli made it happen, with help from luminaries like Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia and Nelson Mandela of Africa and the venue ideas of Robert Black QC, of Lockerbie. Megrahi and Fhimah were finally flown on a special flight to the Netherlands in early April, and on the 6th were official arrested at Camp Zeist and set to await their trial. Sanctions on Libya were immediately suspended, under threat of re-enforcement (that never did materialize). [5]

1993: Involved and Framed?
During this time of intense pressure to get the Libyans to publicly admit their guilt or at least help a court to “prove” it, a remarkable admission was reportedly taken in 1993, taken down by a prominent American journalist with suspected CIA links, Arnaud de Borchgrave. But it was not mentioned in public for over a decade, it would seem. In an article for NewsMax, from January 2004, de Borchgrave first revealed “Gadhafi’s Secret Message”:

"On July 6, after a lengthy interview, he went off the record and asked me to deliver a message to the director of Central Intelligence in Washington. He admitted Libya's guilt for the downing of Pan Am 103, but made clear that it was originally an Iranian retaliatory terrorist attack for the downing by the U.S. Navy of a peaceful Iran Air Airbus
[...]
“So the Iranians subcontracted part of the job to a Syrian intelligence service, which, in turn, asked the Libyan Mukhabarat to handle part of the assignment," Col. Gadhafi explained.“ [6]

Mr. De Borchgrave says he did report this behind the scenes to the CIA immediately on returning home from the interview. Vincent Cannistraro, who had headed the CIA's Lockerbie probe in its earliest (shiftiest) phase, continued throughout the 1990s as a voice for Libyan guilt. He has alluded to Libya taking the Iran contract from the Syrians, following the Autumn Leaves operation, but did not give de Borchgrave as a source nor give col. Gaddafi any credit. [7]

Again on Megrahi’s release, in late August 2009, de Borchgrave wrote about the interview, explaining how he asked Gaddafi “to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.” The Colonel “dismissed all the aides in his tent” and went candid, “in halting English without benefit of an interpreter.” Mostly he decried terrorism and offered to assist the West fight bin Laden-type terror networks. Again, he explained the bombing as payback for the shoot-down of Iran Air 655, an act the Arab world could not accept as an accident:

"[R]etaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). "Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?" said Gaddafi. "We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was," Gaddafi added." [8]

So why, when Libya is usually reported as "always insisting on their innocence," did de Borchgrave’s story and its propaganda power sit in the dark for the crucial years of pressure? Is it the prominent Iranian and Syrian elements? Were the Americans holding out for a Libya-only storyline? That is roughly how it turned out. Interestingly, the colonel reportedly used this “admission” to reiterate Libya did not lead the operation.

“If we had initiated the plot, we would have made sure the accusing finger was pointed in the other direction and we would have picked Cyprus, not Malta, where some of the organization was done. The others picked Malta presumably to frame us.""

This isn't really a big help when your official storyline is that two Libyan JSO operatives, commanded by their JSO higher-ups, had specifically targetted PA103 via Malta airport, picked because Malta was their own "back door to the West." The JSO got the timers and the radio and the semtex, made the bomb, did up their own feasibility studies we were told, and had their two real movers buy the clothes, secure the suitcase, steal the luggage "taggs" to write that death sentence on, and personally shove it off from Malta on D-day. There is no "framed by the Syrians" in that scenario.

And all this when the real evidence Gaddafi may or may not have known about highly suggests the bomb went on PA103 way up in London, with nothing physically to do with Malta at all. Is this just another Libyan non-admission admission? Or worse - an attempt to hijack the West's fantasy narrative and steer it back away from himself?

99/01: Two Other Admission-ish things
Allan Gerson and Jerry Adler’s 2001 book The Price of Terror failed to mention this account of de Borchgrave while citing the available hints that Gaddafi “might have been suffering from a guilty conscience.” In a private 1999 interview with another journalist, Milton Viorst, Gaddafi “edged towards a kind of confession,” the book notes. As Viorst reported it, the leader said"

“Whether we were responsible for bringing down the French plane [UTA 772] will be decided by a French court. We don’t say anything about it. The same is true of Lockerbie. I can’t answer as to wether Libya was responsible. Let’s let the court decide.”
[9]

That's not a full denial, but nowhere near an admission. But it was ambiguous enough that an aide later told Viorst Gaddafi “was not talking officially” and referred him to the Foreign Minister for the government's official story (few realize that Gaddafi is not really the government of Libya). Not being published in the book, we can presume this was the same claim of innocence Libya has always maintained.

In spring 2001, the book continues, Gaddafi reportedly slipped again, and confessed to diplomat Michael Steiner that Libya had been behind the Lockerbie bombing as well as the LaBelle disco bombing in Germany, but had since stopped terrorism and wanted to make up. The source for this was a cable of a top-level meeting with German and American leaders, including President Bush and Chancellor Schroder. A New York Times article from May 23 cites the leaked cable thus:

"Steiner reported on his talks with Qaddafi in Libya. Qaddafi admitted that Libya took part in terrorist actions (La Belle, Lockerbie). He clarified that he had abandoned terrorism and seeks the opportunity to make Libya's new position known. Qaddafi, too, is worried about fundamentalist trends."

Americans were upset this was leaked to the public, and it caused quite a row between Steiner, a flamboyant attention-seeker, and others in the German government, but they confirmed “that "La Belle" and "Lockerbie" were specifically mentioned by Mr. Steiner in this context.” Whatever exactly that proves. [10]

Owning Up in '03?
Many suspect the Zeist trial was never supposed to happen, as the evidence behind the indictment was too weak to stand up at Trial. The Crown's prosecutors managed to swing it somehow, but it took nearly two years from the handover, and a display of mental gymnastics worthy of the Realpolitik Olympics in the scale and skill of it. On January 31 2001, the three-judge panel made it official – Megrahi was legally guilty for the plot, and Fhimah was not guilty.

From there, many insisted sanctions should be lifted to reflect Libya’s good faith through this process. But Bush and Blair balked, demanding an admission of guilt and contrition, plus compensation to victims’ families, before they went past suspension. It was a letter, dated 15 August 2003, from Libya’s Permanent Representative to the President of the Council Ahmed A. Own, that paved the way. Own's letter explains “the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” as Libya calls itself, “has sought to cooperate in good faith throughout the past years” on solving the problems made theirs “resulting from the Lockerbie incident.” It was in this spirit that they “facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials.” [11] Presumably they mean real actions, making this another dodge in some minds.

But the letter also pledged Libya to cooperate with any further investigations, and to settle all compensation claims with haste, and to join the international “War on Terrorism.” It was widely (and reservedly) hailed as a bold… statement. But still evasive. It doesn’t clearly state anywhere the suspects or any Libyans were in any way actually guilty of the “incident.” Nonetheless, after a month of discussion in the Security Council, sanctions were lifted on Sept. 12 2003. France and the US insisted on abstaining, but it was otherwise a unanimous vote of 13. The United States’ own sanctions would remain in full force due to the general evilness of col. Gaddafy, US officials made clear. (Additional normalizations did happen in 2007).

There’s been much oxymoronic harping on this 2003 letter in the West as both an admission of guilt and an arrogant refusal to admit their guilt. The BBC’s 2008 Conspiracy Files episode on Lockerbie is a brilliant example. “For those that believe al Megrahi was framed,” snarls the narrator, Carolyn Katz, “one fact remains hard to explain away. Libya agreed to award substantial compensation for Lockerbie. Sanctions were then lifted.” [12] Well, ignoring that they just answered their own stumper of a question, it’s a good question. Why would they agree on their responsibility and get sanctions lifted unless they knew they were guilty? Just to get sanctions lifted? The movie continues: “Tripoli accepted responsibility for what it called “the Lockerbie incident.” But does it admit guilt?” Of course not, and by pretending there’s some disconnect, they’ve primed the audience to see the darkest of cynicism at work.

No Other Solution

Despite his portrayals as a crazed prophet of death, Moammar Gadaffi proved a shrewd and patient pragmatist in all this. He can't have ever believed his nation actually did the crime, but against "guilty" as a legal truth, he accepted they had no choice but to do “the time.” It’s a type of bind known to breed passive-aggressive tendencies. The Colonel’s son and likely successor Saif al Islam al Gaddafi (left) seems to understand the dilemma. When he was interviewed at home for the same Conspiracy Files program (latter minutes), he was respectably candid, but came across strangely anyway.

Q - Does Libya accept responsibility for the attack on Lockerbie?
A - Yes. We wrote a letter to the Security Council, saying that we are responsible for the acts of our employees, or people. But it doesn’t mean that we did it, in fact.
Q - So to be very clear on this, what you’re saying is that you accept responsibility, but you’re not admitting that you did it.
A - Of course.
(edit)
Q - That’s… to many people will sound like a very cynical way to conduct your relationship with the outside world.
A - What can you do? Without writing that letter, you will not be able to get out of the sanction.
Q - So this statement was just word play. It wasn’t an admission of guilt.
A - No. I admit that we play with the words. And we had to. We had to. There was no other… solution. [13]

The BBC are masters, among others, of careful editing, and it helped bolster their whole “you don’t admit you’re guilty” thing where people have to explain there’s nothing to “admit” (or fail to explain that, as happened here). Thus he could, with a little imagination, appear to be saying “we don’t admit it, buuuuut of course we did it, you already know that.” Note the cut that removed some of his words from the middle of the exchange, unlikely to have been irrelevant. Thus is clearly established a cynical payout ($2.7 billion) and bit of semantics to buy up and slough off their non-admitted guilt so they could resume trade. They got away with Lockerbie using money and words and are laughing at us and making more money!

Immediately after “there was no other solution,” the video cuts right to the interviewer asking “so it was like blood money if you like,” which seems to be referring to what was just shown. But really it refers to the American victims' families, whose “money, money, money, money” attitude (well-known and spearheaded by Victims of PA103 Inc.) was “materialistic,” “greedy,” and amounted to “trading with the blood of their sons and daughters.” It's tactless statement, but with the magic of editing, it can seem to mean so much more!
---
Sources:
[1] History of UN Sanctions on Libya. href="http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/195-libya/42383.html
[2] Gerson, Allan and Jerry Adler. "The Price of Terror: Lessons of Lockerbie for a World on the Brink. Harper Collins, 2001.
[3] Thomas, Pierre and Thomas W. Lippman. $4 Million Reward Offered in Pan Am Case. Washington Post. March 24 1995. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/panam103/stories/reward032495.htm
[4] Gerson and Adler pp 101-102
[4.5] "Case Studies in Sanctions and Terrorism: Libya" The Peterson Institute. Date given as October 14 1996, Source given as International Herald Tribune, 14 October 1995, 13. http://www.petersoninstitute.org/research/topics/sanctions/libya.cfm
[5] http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/8/23958.shtml
[6] http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/8/23958.shtml
[7] Biewen, John and Ian Ferguson. "Mass Murder Over Scotland." Shadow over Lockerie series. American Radio Works, 2000. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/lockerbie/story/printable_story.html
[8] http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/honor-among-terrorists
[9] Gerson and Adler, pp 290-291
[10] Cohen, Roger. "German cable on Qaddafi sets off dispute." The New York Times. May 23 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/23/world/german-cable-on-qaddafi-sets-off-dispute.html?pagewanted=all
[11] UN Security Council. Letter dated 15 August 2003... http://www.undemocracy.com/S-2003-818.pdf
[12] UN Security Council. 12 September 2003/ Press Release SC/7868: Security Council Lifts Sanctions Imposed on Libya. http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/sc7868.doc.htm
[13] The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie." Prod/Dir Guy Smith, Ex Prod Sam Anstiss, Narr Caroline Catz. BBC Two. First Aired 31 August 2008. 52:49 mark. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-327765978162851498&hl=en#
[14] see 13, 53:40 mark

Discussion of the Yvonne Fletcher shooting

2011-03-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

March 17
last edits March 26

It's a bit of a side note for this forum, but relevant enough to at least note a fast-moving discussion at the JREF forum on the April 1984 shooting of police constable Yvonne Fletcher (Wikipedia page, news clip with video of the shooting). This was of course blamed on the Libyans, who were trying to shoot protesters outside their embassy in London, in broad daylight, with police present and cameras rolling. The firing injured I believe 11 protesters, and apparently on accident completely skewered Yvonne Fletcher, the only female constable present, killing her. Bad mistake.

It was a major crisis, souring UK-Libya relations in public opinion and on the politcal/military level. The post-Fletcher hardened stance allowed, for example, the US bombing of Libya two years later to be carried out from UK territory. Bad mistake.

We know they did it because they transmitted the order from Tripoli to do it, they left all their ammo behind, and residue of firing by the second floor window. Bad mistake.

And we were told this line of fire was compatible with the injuries sustained by WPC Fletcher. But that's less than clear, to say the least. Some existing conspiracy theories (by Joe Vialls and others) are being hashed over, with plenty of error and inconsistency coming up. But there may well be something interesting to come of out original analysis anyways. This post will be updated to distill the findings, when there are some real findings. In the meantime, it's worth a read or at least a skim. The link again.

Update March 26, major development: one of the embassy staff suspected in this killing, but never caught because no one would break a law about searching bags, has been captured in the bloodbath of Benghazi just now! (more forthcoming)
---
Finding one: A cornerstone of the prevailing conspiracy theory, promoted by Joe Vialls and a 1996 documentary for BBC Dispatches, is the angle of fire evident in ms. Fletcher's post-mortem report. This was steep, running from right shoulder to left abdomen, taken down as 60 degrees from horizontal. The Libyan People's Bureau (LPB) second-floor window (first floor in UK speak) is only about 18' off the ground, giving a line of fire to Ms. Fletcher of about 15 degrees. Revisionists so far have asserted the 60-degree-line points right up to another, taller building (Enserch House, EH), that housed a secret CIA station.

I don't believe the shot that killed her did come from the LPB, but contrary to what everyone else has said so far, the implied line of fire doesn't support it. I used video and Google maps to set her location and measure the distances involved - she was at the northeast corner - about 60 feet to the nearest window of the LPB and about 90 from the same at EH.

the height of the buildings is roughly the same - about 50 feet for the LPB and 60 for Enserch. Being further away however makes it actuall a worse fit for vertical angle, IF we were talking top floors or rooftops. But taking the official shooting level, upper Enserch House remains a better fit, at about 30 degrees. Either way, we must be seeing the effect of bullet deflection off bone, and/or an unusual posture at moment of impact.

Finding 2: forthcoming.

Finding 3: Following the shooting on April 17, the embassy staff at the LPB was besieged inside and only allowed to leave nine days later on the 26th. It was only four days after that, following a SAS sweep of the place for booby-traps, nearly two weeks after that guess-based siege, that police found any direct evidence the shooting came from inside.

On 30 April, the police entered the former bureau building. In the course of searching it, they discovered several handguns and a quantity of ammunition. Firearms residue was found on the carpet below the window from which the weapon was believed to have been fired on 17 April and a spent cartridge case of the same calibre as that weapon was found in the same room. Elsewhere in the building, the police found accessories for sub-machine guns of the same calibre.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1996/may/08/wpc-yvonne-fletcher

But the murder weapon itself was allowed to leave the country in a diplomatic pouch. Because to search it would violate a law. (???) But they had nine days to clean the carpet and walls for any clues their stupid, stupid, stupid alleged crime left. Nine days and no one thought about it.

This just doesn't add up. Angles aside, this looks a wee bit like a frame-up.

After the Break-In

2011-03-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Connecting Manly's and Bedford's evidence with a two-phase operation
January 17 2011
last update Feb. 10

Note 2/6: See the comments below, which address half of "the middle part" below. Rolfe has soundly debunked the build-up introduction theory and its implied conspiracy. There is, however, the option of re-positioning of the cases at that location, by the same intruder, after their introduction at Interline. I've left the text alone however, so the article and comments become a continuous learning experience.

The Defense's "Missing" Link
I’ve previously explained the security breach at Heathrow airport’s terminal three, found and reported by guard Ray Manly in the first minutes of December 21. A lock to the secured airside area was broken, leaving the way open, perhaps, for a terrorist to place an explosive device amongst the luggage out there. There was no police intervention before the bombing of Flight 103 several hours later, and Manly’s police statement about it “disappeared” afterwards.

As noted in that article, the break-in is not some lone clue floating without any context. It is in fact central to the increasingly clear London origin theory. The explosion time – 38 minutes after leaving the airport – matches with the known altimeter-based weaponry of the most logical villains aside from Libya, if it were loaded at Heathrow. Before that, but following the break-in, a pair of suitcases eerily like the one that blew up were seen around 4:40 PM. Well before the investigation’s bomb in the same case could have arrived from Malta, these appeared mysteriously within the doomed luggage container AVE 4041.

And of special interest here is the fact that Heathrow is the most logical place to load a bomb onto a London-to-NY flight. A remote loading gives numerous chances for interception, and no control over final bomb placement within the container. The bomb did wind up in the only spot of AVE 4041 from which it could do its job (lower outboard corner – see graphics below), by sheer bad luck we’re told. But in fact we have good reason to suspect intelligent terrorist hands undercover at Heathrow airside, perhaps contravening normal rules of loading.

But these are more circumstantial points. It’s in connecting Ray Manly’s report of a break-in at terminal 3 and John Bedford’s report of what could well be the primary suitcase, that the defense case, and the London theory as argued on appeal in 2002, was based. As the appeal court judges considering this at one point put it, “the appellant [Megrahi] sought to link the damage to the padlock with the Bedford suitcases” [242]

[To clarify a side-point, I proceed here on a different assumption from most. A careful reading of Bedford suggests both mystery cases he saw were the same color and style. As he said: “They were hard cases, the type Samsonite make. One was brown in color and the other one, if it wasn’t the same color, it was similar.” This plus their appearance at the same time suggests – though it doesn’t prove - a matching set from one owner, and thus both suspicious. Somehow no one else seems to read him the same way, and focuses on one of the two (which one?) that matches the official style. But I go with what I see, causing the occasional disconnect between singular and plural forms below. [also: If the case(s) were bombing-related as many suspect, it’s possible that both contained bombs (one of which didn’t fully detonate?), or more likely one was a filler, added for realism, etc. I have good reason to suspect the “one case recovered” (actually less than half a case worth of fragments) was not the bomb bag, but on the floor, beneath it - Dr. Hayes once said so.]

In connecting the ‘round midnight report of the broken lock and the late afternoon suitcase sighting by Bedford, There is the problem of elapsed hours, as brought up by the prosecution and favored by the appeal judges. Why break in, plant a bomb bag among the luggage, and then leave, only to have it loaded to the last flight of the day about 17 hours later?

It’s a fair question but not a slam-dunk. If some would-be Lockerbie bomber were on the ground cutting locks at midnight, might he not be willing to come back for a second penetration? Below is a two-phase operation scenario that I think accounts for everything as well as everything can be accounted for. It’s about what I might try for if I knew as much as I imagine this guy knew, and was evil enough to carry out such a thing. I feel that it answers all the major problems pointed out during the appeal, which I will go over for comparison following the plot outline.

Phase one: Getting the bomb to the luggage place
We start around 11:45 PM on December 20, with the terrorist mastermind - Arabic in appearance, or Persian, or blond-haired and blue-eyed, depending. He's at terminal three, standing in front of door T32a, with no one else nearby. To force open a padlock, in general your options would be:
- Sledhehammer (Loud, ineffective against rubber doors like these.)
- Hacksaw (loud and slow)
- Crowbar (loud, crude, unsure)
- Powerful (long-handled) bolt cutters.
- Other (I’m not a tool guy really)

Bolt cutters seem the quickest and quietest – a polite cough might conceal the snip from anyone down the way. Heathrow was under serious maintenance in those days, with workers coming and going all over, according to airport employees speaking at trial. So a maintenance worker could be a good costume to explain the bulky tool, the work gloves (leaves no fingerprints), and the oversize toolbox that he wouldn’t want searched. So long as he isn’t caught in mid-snip, he’d be airside in the December dark within seconds.

He could then empty his toolbox at any number of spots – one he either planned out or picks at the time. Maybe some out-of-the-way spot around a corner from a corner, the kind of place you could sneak a pee with little chance of being seen, even in the day. And behind something else within that spot - an air vent cover, or a large machine with an accessible cavity. Or anywhere that two good-sized suitcases could hide unseen for half a day in a place only he knows.

They would be fully loaded, tagged for PA103, and ready to be smuggled among the outgoing luggage. But they weren’t to be placed yet. That’s too important to be left to chance.

In court, Ray Manly said of the break-in "if somebody had done their job then maybe, maybe [the bombing] may not have happened." But in this scenario, the police would not likely find anything even if they did show up and search the airside area. The whole place would have to be almost disassembled, and all the luggage out there double-checked for purity to be sure nothing untoward was there. At the point these activities were undertaken, the bombing may, sadly, have been unstoppable under normal circumstances.

At least, until the cases re-surfaced and ran a chance of looking odd to eyes put on the alert....

Phase Two: Turning the bomb into luggage
Phase one accomplished and no tracks left, the bomber would calmly depart the scene, ditching the empty toolbox and bolt-cutters, but not the gloves. In case this lock-cutting was reported and then caused an alarm (it didn’t), he might give them all day to relax again when nothing happens. He’d get some sleep and allow for at least one shift change at terminal three. He’d even have time to sleep in and have a nourishing brunch of brain food in the hotel lobby, with only one other thing planned for the day.

And that would be at the airport again, coming back in the early afternoon. He’d dress in a black-market Pan Am jumpsuit for a luggage-handling disguise. And he’s carrying nothing but his black-market airside pass (hundreds were missing), appropriate fake ID in a wallet with some cash, and perhaps a pocket-knife if that’s allowed and recovery will require un-screwing. He’s carrying no bags to search. No bombs. He's waved into the secured area where he's got his bomb hidden and ready to make-believe it's someone's matching suitcases.

Upon re-entry, he’d slide over to his hiding nook to retrieve them, maintaining supreme alertness to manage it unseen. Now in a new costume, Pan Am worker bee carrying two (misrouted, if anyone asks) copper Samsonites, he’d emerge on the tarmac and just blend in.

If possible, and in general, the next thing he’d do is manually place them in the lower outboard corner (see below) of a Pan Am container, hoping for the best from there (he may have gotten it).

The middle part: Interline or Build-Up?
The middle part, just where the container would ideally be when he made his move, is more “choose-your-own-adventure,” based on some uncertainty on my on part. It’s a little complicated, and most readers can just be skip to the last paragraph here.

My previous, almost gospel, interpretation, takes John Bedford’s amazing account as literally true. This has the suitcases introduced at the interline shed, the place for processing luggage from non-Pan Am connecting flights. He says his co-worker with Alert security, the ones who x-ray the bags, had placed the matching brown Samsonites in his brief absence, although the co-worker, Sulkash Kamboj, denies this.

In this version, the Lockerbie bomber at Heathrow would have Mr. Kamboj and his x-ray to deal with, which could be dealt with in at least two ways. He could just stand outside, put the Samsonites on the belt running into the shed like any luggage, let Kamboj scan them unseen by him, and just hope they pass and are placed by luck in the right corner. He could also Step into the shed, pay the x-ray man a wad of cash to ignore his job, suggest it’s drugs in there, not bombs, and try to place them himself in the right corner. The latter would offer a better chance of success, but still has its obvious dangers – like the guy taking the cash and then removing the bags for scrutiny anyway once the intruder was gone.

Another problem is the suitcase positions Bedford reported – position “A” in the image below, flat across the floor. The bomb was in a case of just this type, but by the evidence (and officially) in the upper of the two as shown in “B.” Both cases in B are ideally placed, against the sloped floor panel, which winds up nearest the curve of the airliner’s hull. This would only require a stacking of the two cases in “A”, nothing too extreme, really. However, that would make the one on the right in “A” the most likely to be holding the bomb (if there was only one). This is clearly not an ideal placement, suggesting the terrorist was unable to arrange them himself at interline.

An alternate narrative involves the same two cases actually being inserted at the baggage build-up area. Here baggage from Heathrow-originating passengers was consolidated into containers, and occasionally a container started at interline would be topped off or await an incoming flight here. AVE4041 was one of those. If the cases were first spotted here, that might leave Bedford’s story both literally untrue and still relevant, in a cynical but plausible situation like this:

Peter Walker, who was in charge of the build-up area, goes to take AVE 4041 out to meet the German feeder flight to be filled. But as he steps to it, he sees and makes note of the two “Bedford suitcases,” which weren’t there when Bedford dropped it off. And they’re stacked against the outboard panel as shown in “B” above.

He sees this after sitting inside for around 40 minutes, never watching the container for a moment. No one else was guarding it, and it sat unattended and wide open for most of an hour. Perhaps for fear of causing trouble he ignores the anomaly and lets it slide. (There’s probably a good reason. It’s not like we’re on high alert following a break-in or anything.) It’s taken out to K16, and filled up with items from Frankfurt, none of them holding any explosives, and then is loaded onto 103.

But after the news of what happened less than an hour later, he’d put it together. Even the placement was a clue - the bomb was in one of those cases, ideally placed nearest the hull. So he compels someone else (Bedford) to say he saw them, way over there at interline, and that Indian guy “Camjob” (as Bedford calls him) is the one who placed them. They’d be x-rayed, one would presume. (But if not, hey… it was him, not either of us.) And further, they were reported by Bedford as flat on the floor, not stacked in that optimal way.

This is a rather convoluted thing to suspect, and requires some conspiracy, but it does explain a number of things. It should be noted that Walker provided Bedford’s alibi (a tea break together) for being absent when Kamboj placed the bags. And besides the Bedford/Kamboj disagreements, there are serious inconsistencies in Walker’s statements. To police in 1989 he swore he never saw or was aware of the container at all, contradicting Bedford. In 1990, he fixed this and confirmed that Bedford had brought it over, as they had agreed to over tea. At trial in 2000 he admitted the change in stories is strange, but he said for whatever reason, "I can’t explain it."

In this scenario, the suitcases memory in Bedford’s story is accurate enough to be a clue, even if it’s not his own memory, but transferred from one mind to another. It also allows for the flat position to be an additional fudging, so that not even Kamboj facilitated their potent stacking. (That was apparently someone later down the line, if it's decided that happened at all.)

Both options involve the danger of Kamboj, Walker, Bedford, or someone else reporting or removing the bags. Every London option has that danger, and that risk is tripled in the official story through three airports, making this still preferable. Logic says they’d choose Heathrow, and less clearly it suggests the bomber would choose build-up. But Bedford suggests he chose interline. Either way, the reference to brown, hard-shell Samsonites in the deadly corner of AVE4041 shouldn’t just be presumed to be a coincidence.

Appeal judgment addressed:
Following are some excerpts from the second “Opinion of the Court” from Camp Zeist, following the appeal of Feb. 2002.

"[244] ...Moreover, although readily discoverable evidence of the break-in had been left behind in the form of the damaged padlock, the hypothesis involved that the case was not introduced into the interline shed until some fifteen hours later..."
True, but it’s no problem for the two-phase explanation - it’s the basis of it. In fact, the build-up version involves an even longer span, by as much as an hour, than the one the judges half-considered.

"...Unless the risk of opening the case airside to set the timer was to be undertaken, the timer would have had to be set before the break-in..."
Ice-cube timers that blow around 38 minutes after takeoff don’t need to be set, of course. So this point doesn’t apply to my version, nor, I think, to the case made by the defense.

"... No method of arranging for the bag to pass through the system to the interline shed had been identified..."
Perhaps not by the defense, but I propose the method was manual placement supported by psychological deception.

"... The intruder would have required either to wait for fifteen hours himself, or to have the assistance of an accomplice..."
Either works. I’m betting on one well-trained operative with the requisite patience.

"... No place of concealment for the intruder or the suitcase had been identified..."
No place identified? I suspect the intruder was an out-of-towner, and concealed himself at a hotel for that time. As for the bomb suitcases, no one has shown any reason to rule out all potential hiding spots, like those mentioned above or a dozen others. Do they imagine there would be no suitable spots? Aren't they presuming they were "hidden" right inside the interline shed?

"... There was nothing in the evidence to explain why a suitcase, brought through T3-2A between 2205 and 0030 hours, would not be placed in the interline shed in time for either of the two earlier PanAm flights. On the hypothesis under examination, the suitcase had been tagged for flight PA103, although there were two earlier flights that would have involved a shorter period of concealment of a suitcase containing an armed explosive device... "
Again with "armed" and time spans. Unless the airport suddenly levitates a few thousand feet, the bomb is stable. Remember, it's altimeter-triggered, in this non-Libyan plot. If the bomb is concealed and ready for a phase two, no one but him will put it in the shed, on no timeline other than his own. There’s no need to rush things; even doing it the same day is unnecessary. And besides, they may have been targetting Flight 103 itself for some specific reason.

"... Yet there was no evidence that there was anything about flight PA103 or its passengers that singled it out as the target."
This is widely disputed, but for my part I take no stock in certain individuals (Charles McKee, etc.) being targeted. But here are other reasons I could see why they might choose to wait for this one, depending what they knew from advanced research:
- the plane’s age (it was one of the oldest around) and its brittle skin. (see this frightening video)
- its inhabitant’s average youth, to maximize the sense of loss.
- its lateness, last flight of the day. As explained above, giving time for security to relax, for sleep, and for a costume change.

"...Moreover, if an accomplice with airport identification, genuine or false, was involved, there was no need to break in to airside..."
Except to have no friggin' bomb on him when he showed his pass and perhaps was subjected to search prior to entering a secured area… which of course was not secure at this point, and he may have had a bomb waiting for him inside.

"...All that was required was to smuggle the components of the explosive device through an access point, such as T3-2A, where persons with appropriate identification were not searched..."
Even the stray suitcases they're bringing in aren't searched? I don't know - I imagine a ready-made bombs aren't smart to bring through, and the judges agree, speculating "component parts" being smuggled and then assembled out on the tarmac somewhere. (???) For the bomb’s entry behind the perimeter, where worker-looking people are generally trusted, I think an unacknowledged sneak-job of the ready package would be wisest. A break-in at midnight would be genius.

"... The effect of all these points, the Advocate depute submitted, was to show that the hypothesis that the break-in at T3-2A was the means of infiltrating one of the Bedford suitcases was so weak and flawed that the additional evidence could not pass the Cameron test..."
My theory has it introducing both of them. I didn't read just what "the Cameron test is," but it's from a case involving someone named Cameron, and probably means a point doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, compared to something else already "established." At least, not when the scrutiny is as skewed as their Lordships' is. When they say “the Advocate depute submitted” they also seem to be saying “we think.” But the A.D.’s job is to argue his case, however unsupported, and their job is to judge fairly, not just agree with the one line of argument as if it were a self-evident truth.

"[251] In our view the Advocate depute was right in submitting that the additional evidence did not demonstrate any link between the break-in at T3-2A and the Bedford suitcases..."
Perhaps not, but now I have. A potential one at least.

"... It might be said that there was a temporal link, in the sense that the break-in occurred some fifteen hours before the Bedford suitcases appeared in the interline shed..."
Yes. In a 17-year career, the worst security breach Manly ever saw, and the worst terrorist bombing in UK history, happening within the same 17-hour span, is definitely a temporal connection.

"... It seems to us, however, that that interval of time, so far from pointing to a connection between the two events, casts considerable doubt on whether they can have been connected..."
"Can have been connected?" Wow. No imagination at all.

"...The lapse of time after a readily detectable break-in, creating a period during which the infiltrator and the case (or, if there was an accomplice, the unaccompanied case) would require to be concealed in the airside area, points away from a connection..."
Again, the lapse of time after the detectable event is explained by me as a cool down period in case the detection raised an alarm. Sixteen or so hours is, if anything, a bit short for this purpose, but it apparently worked.

"...Moreover, any attempt to link the Bedford suitcases with the break-in raises unanswered questions as to why the infiltrator ignored the baggage build-up area, and introduced the cases into the considerably more remote interline shed..."
Any attempt? Not my variation where the bomb is introduced at build-up. They're the same suitcases then, just the "Walker suitcases" instead of the Bedford ones.

In addition, given the evidence as to the ability of a person with airport identification to pass through T3-2A during the day without being subjected to search, and given the evidence led at the trial and mentioned by the trial court in para [24] about the substantial number of such passes unaccounted for, it is not clear why a break-in would have been seen as necessary, since the components of the explosive device could have been smuggled through an access point.
Repeated just to emphasize the bolded, to remind the reader how easy it would be for a terrorist to sneak back into the airside area where he'd earlier hidden the bomb he meant to get onto Flight 103.

Addendum: Completely unaware of the break-in that changes the whole scene for the imagine Heathrow intruder, the Zeist judges put the situtation pretty well in their paragraph 24 (in its entirety)

[24] It emerges from the evidence therefore that a suitcase which could fit the
forensic description of the primary suitcase was in the container when it left the interline shed. There is also a possibility that an extraneous suitcase could have been introduced by being put onto the conveyor belt outside the interline shed, or introduced into the shed itself or into the container when it was at the build-up area. To achieve that, the person placing the suitcase would have had to avoid being detected, but the evidence indicates that a person in possession of a pass for the airside area would not be likely to be challenged, and there were a very large number of passes issued for Heathrow, a substantial number of which were not accounted for. The person placing the suitcase would also have required to know where to put it to achieve the objective.

---

Michael Isikoff's Foray(s) into a Culture of Counterfeiting

2011-03-10T02:41:00.000-08:00

March 10 2011
last edits March 11

The article's context
Michael Isikoff is Newsweek’s renowned U.S. national security journalist, and the NBC and MSNBC networks’ “national investigative correspondent.” From this lofty perch, he recently decided to write up a new article about the Lockerbie bombing, which wound up being titled 'No question' Gadhafi ordered Pan Am bombing, ex-CIA official says. The current protest-turned civil war in Libya has hopes rising that colonel Muammar Gaddafi will soon be overthrown after more than four decades in power. Riding this giddy onrush of opening possibilities, it's clearly time to revisit the issue from a different angle.

Mr. Isikoff drew on two recent statements from foreigners – a Gaddafi regime defector and an Abu Nidal terrorist - that the bombing of Flight 103 was a Libyan plot, that the convicted “Lockerbie bomber” Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was involved but only in a small way (not the central one he was convicted for), and that the reviled and (perhaps) tottering Gaddafi ordered the whole thing.

The terrorist, named Abu Bakr, has told this same convoluted story years ago, and it’s been widely panned and dismissed already. The defector, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, was until a month ago Gaddafi’s justice minister. He seems to be both distancing himself from the regime and appointing himself head of the new order, and his un-explained “revelation” plays to both ambitions. But it’s being taken as both self-serving and likely true in Washington; as Mr. Isikoff noted, “in light of” this bargaining chip, Secretary of State Clinton has said she would push for the bombing case to be re-opened after nearly 20 years.

The US Justice Department seems favorable, given recent statements, to building a renewed and widened investigation. It should here be noted that the Scottish police also threatened the same thing following Megrahi’s release from Scotland in 2009, also with the idea of pushing the scope further upwards towards Col. Gaddafi. This hasn’t yet materialized, but their case, like the FBI's remains open – with exactly one officer staffing it, last anyone checked.

What some investigation would reveal
If NBC’s “national investigative correspondent” had done his job, and looked into the Lockerbie case prior to these developments, he’d have noticed where the last investigation has gone. Megrahi and a co-conspirator, Lamin Fhimah, were indicted in 1991, with the former convicted in 2001, as the article notes. Unnoted however is the serious challenge to that conviction from an official legal review board. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), established to root out bad cases that judges didn’t catch the first two times around, announced in 2007 that in at least six ways the conviction of al-Megrahi might have been a miscarriage of justice. They approved another appeal to be heard in court again, but it never was.

If Mr. Isikoff combed a bit wider, he’d see that a small handful of UK family of the victims, a large number of legal experts in Scotland and beyond, intelligence and airline security professionals, political and religious leaders, investigative journalists (the kind that investigate), and many others of general credibility agree with the SCCRC that the trial might’ve been – or was - grossly wrong in its conclusions. (a decent listing of about 100 can be seen here.) For example, one of Scotland’s most respected lawyers, Ian Hamilton QC, who has now joined the swelling Justice for Megrahi (JFM) campaign has said "I don't think there's a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted.” What happened instead, he and others feel, was that the Americans “hoodwinked our courts."

Anyone who investigates a bit will find that these people cite serious questions looming precariously over the whole situation. For example, a key witness, Abdul Majid Giaka, whose tales brought together the 1991 indictments, was utterly dismissed at trial. He’d find that following from that, Megrahi’s “alleged co-conspirator” Fhimah was found specifically not guilty and sent home. An accomplice was necessary for the plot alleged, placing the bomb case onto Air Malta flight 180, and none is accepted.

He might even learn that there is no direct evidence of that unaccompanied suitcase from Malta transferring onto Flight 103. There is only an inference drawn from an unverifiable computer printout that’s flatly contradicted by other, and much better, evidence.

And the centerpiece of Megrahi’s own proven connection to the bombing, purchasing the clothes inside the bomb suitcase, cannot be factually supported. The Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci supposedly identified Megrahi (among others), but his own evidence, investigated fairly, rules out the Libyan in several specific and incontrovertible ways.

One way or another, investigators seem to have gotten it entirely wrong.

Or, you could ...
Stepping into this complex milieu, Mr. Isikoff chose the investigative tack of citing the new Libyan defector and the talkative terrorist, and by talking to the men who may well have gotten it wrong in the first place. Not surprisingly, along this guided tour, not a single question over Megrahi’s conviction or the case it affirmed is to be seen.

One of the two men he spoke with was Frank Anderson, CIA Near East affairs chief between 1991-1995, and now president of the Middle East Policy Council think tank, "your source for unbiased assessments of who’s too evil to be left in charge of Libya." The other interviewee is Richard Marquise, the man who headed up the FBI’s investigation in its crucial second half, and who still disputes the findings of the last court, at the very least over their dismissal of Giaka. The entirety of the SCOTBOM probe Marquise oversaw, in conjunction with the Scottish police, is summed up thusly by Isikoff:

… U.S. and British officials were able to wrap up an investigation that uncovered forensic and other evidence linking the planting of the bomb to Abdelbasset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer.

“Uncovered” might not be the right word there, but such clues did come to be in the evidence chain and some did point right to Libya and/or Megrahi.

For example, there were three whole important witnesses against Megrahi. One, Giaka, was dismissed at trial, and another, Edwin Bollier, is a known fabricator and spinner of bizarre tales mostly dismissed at trial. The third, Tony Gauci, was an idiot coached by his brother, who never really identified Megrahi but did rule him out, and who changed his story to fit Megrahi a little better, which version was somehow accepted at trial. At least two of these three seem to have been paid in excess of $2 million for their bogus testimony, according to Scotish police and other documents uncovered by the SCCRC. That’s not how one “uncovers” any kind of valid “evidence,” and as we can see, none was so obtained.

There also exist serious anomalies around every crucial piece of physical evidence, leading tactics, circular and suspect reasoning, and really just a shocking string of egregious malpractice down the line. (Consider the supposed reasoning that brought Scots detective Harry Bell to first decide on Megrahi, for another telling example).

If anyone had direct access to the full scope of this systematic abuse of truth, it would be Isikoff's other source, Richard Marquise, who just firmly loads the weight of world affairs on his sure and square shoulders. "We always hoped that had we gotten (access to Megrahi and Fhimah) they would start to roll,” he told Isikoff. That is, they might reveal who told them to carry out this bizarre and evidence-free plot. "There was always an expectation that we would get further up the chain."

Don't bounce this check, folks
Unlike Mr. Marquise, the other official interviewed, Frank Anderson, likely had no role in or direct knowledge of the investigation. For whatever reason, however, his statement was the headline, distilled from his summation:

"There are two things that you can take to the bank. The first one is, Pan Am 103 was perpetrated by agents of the Libyan government. And the second thing is, that could not have happened without Moammar Gadhafi's knowledge and consent. There is no question in my mind that Moammar Gadhafi authorized the bombing of Pan Am 103."

Telling people they can take those to the bank is counterfeiting. But it’s the same culture – secrecy and appeal to authority slathered on to lubricate the insertion of politically useful fiction into the real-world evidence slot - that has underpinned this whole case so far.

Mr. Anderson has perhaps just been duped, and isn’t aware how deceptive his affirmation is. His relevant expertise is on Libya and its troublesome regime, not the investigation and trial. And his conclusion that Gaddafi had to have ordered the attack is not even rocket surgery to guess in the affirmative. The whole motive is supposed to have been the early 1986 U.S. air raids on both Tripoli and Benghazi (ah, how times are changing), which killed the colonel’s baby daughter. It took almost three years to exact the overblown revenge so eerily similar to what the Iranians were suspected of plotting just then. But clearly, if it happened as Marquise et al. found (it didn't, not that it matters), it would probably run up to Gaddafi himself.

But people are playing dumb all of a sudden and pretending to need proof of an order from on high, when Libya was sanctioned to the tune of tens of billions lost and thousands dead, in order to punish or destabilize the whole regime, just on the presumption. This punishment only ended with Gaddafi surrendering his indicted agents for trial, losing one to prison, paying a hefty $2.7 billion settlement, foreswearing all terrorist (“revolutionary”) activities, foregoing a nuclear deterrent, sealing trade deals too sweet to refuse, and so on.

And again, by the best evidence read fairly, he may well have done this all without once ordering the bombing of Pan Am 103.

This patient re-building from the epic abuses of the past was tolerated until about now, and it’s to be all yanked away by this bizarre US-supported protest/war. Ideally for some, the proceeds of Gaddafi's work will be handed to Mr. Abdel-Jalil, who will in trade find some “proof” to hang his old boss with and close the old chapter for good. Gaddafi delenda est. He must be dust. It has been demanded.

Along the way we’ll accept in stasis the original case with Megrahi, until the guilty verdict for his boss re-convinces us that was correct all along, as if there were some reason to doubt it.

How in a supposedly free media articles like this happen, over and over, with no widely-seen counter-balance, I cannot say. Noam Chomsky (another Justice for Megrahi signatory) has some theories, but all I know is however it’s happening, our investigative correspondents like Isikoff aren’t investigating, just corresponding with the approved investigators to write the news for them. Please turn sideways and watch your head squeezing into this ever-smaller echo chamber, folks.

And hopefully, this model of news-writing will be exported to Libya soon, along with a hell of a lot of other things.

Suliman on Swissy and the Student Union

2011-03-07T00:49:00.000-08:00

March 6, 2011
edits March 24

It’s been suggested to me that this is unwise, but I am offering another platform to Suliman, the persistent and inflammatory critic of the Justice for Megrahi campaign (JFM) and its members. He has quite a roster of rotating smears. Previously he's suggested Dr. Jim Swire was a racist, Robert Forrester an alcoholic, Professor Black a paid shill for Libya, and others. He also challenged me personally that I “will not touch” the important issue of Dr. Swire’s “dignity” in accepting Libya’s compensation money for his daughter’s death, despite believing them not guilty. I touched it, and smacked it down as irrelevant and mean-spirited name-blackening, and strangely, Suliman is the one no longer bringing up that accusation of … whatever exactly he was driving at.

And in trade, he of course did not and never will touch my challenge [same link above] to support with evidence just one central clue of Megrahi's (and thus Gaddafi's) guilt for the Lockerbie bombing.

Now that same "stolen money" is not a matter of dignity, but of employment, as a “whore” of Libya, of the kind to be “dealt with” after, and as, Gaddafi’s regime is being dealt with now! In a more recent missive, Suliman claims three JFM founding members have a “known financial connection with the Gaddafi regime.” Jim Swire and, he thinks, Father Pat Keegans are connected via “the Lockerbie compensations -- at least,” acceptance of which makes one “effectively a prepaid lobbyist.”

Period.

Unless you toe the government line and accept the verdict, as most do. Or just keep quiet and let that prevailing version unfold without protest. Taking the money then is fine with propagandist Suliman, as it keeps the Libyan regime as hated as possible. But if you look at the evidence for yourself, and find something different from what he imagines one should find (he can only imagine of course, refusing to look for himself), and dare to speak up about it, you obviously fit this bill:

Swire, Forrester and Co. [JFM] should be treated as undeclared agents of a foreign terrorist syndicate, until proven otherwise. … suspicious affiliations … serving the agenda of an international mass murderer …

The notion is obviously absurd. But the third cited example, and perhaps the entirety of the "suspicious affiliations," might have more to it, and it's to that I turn:

(3) Abdullah Swissy, JFM's Libyan co-founder, was a government sponsored student. How in the hell could he be financially independent of his financial sponsors?

Wow - nothing like student financial aid to secure one's services in furtherance of terrorism.

But he's more than just a Libyan student, of course. Abdullah Swissy has been described in his earlier JFM activities as “Former President of the Libyan Students' Union in Scotland and Libyan Student Affairs of the Libyan Students' Union, UK Branch.” (example) And of course, being Libyan, one must expect "student union" is but a euphemism for a terrorist front group. I guess (??).

Mr. Swissy was one of seven founding signatories of the Justice for Megrahi campaign in 2008, at the time seeking only the prisoner's return home on compassionate grounds. He has since un-signed for unspecified reasons, as the campaign shifted to re-examination of the case (something Suliman claims Gaddafi was not allowed to pursue). And apparently he is not always mentioned as a founding member in JFM literature, something Suliman takes as suspect.

It seems the alleged plot is this: Gaddafi decided to overturn the Megrahi verdict, and ordered a murderous minion to form a pressure group with some British dupes. He had the minion join the group, only to withdraw to not give the game away. But the brief lapse gave Suliman the sleuth his crucial clue - a freely-offered signature is his evidence for this secret plot.

Okay, that's not an amazing narrative, but I'll let it slide and humor the guy. Suliman's central problem seems to be less with Swissy himself as the group he's held an office within, also called the Jamahirya Student Union. Here are some of the clues Suliman has offered about this group, so far short on specifics:

...the same organization that produced the goons who were expelled from the UK for their role in the murder of a British policewoman on duty, protecting Libyan students in a demonstration against the extrajudicial killings by Swire and Black's partner organization in the pursuit of justice...
…
Would Black also join hands with the KKK in a campaign for racial equality? How about the American Nazi Party? Don't be offended, how could you? Before you do that, go contrast the public positions of the KKK and ANP vs. the unrepented JSU on the use of lynch mobs, violence and terrorism as means of doing justice.
… [source]

And if Swire knew sh*t about human rights in Libya, he would not join hands with the Jamahiriya Student Union in the pursuit of what he calls "justice."
...
Do you need any clues about the "judicial" principles and record of your JFM partners, the Jamahiriya Student Union? Are those agents of Gaddafi exempt from the logic that Gaddafi's agents cannot operate independently? [source]

So I gather from this that - allegedly - the JSU was killing someone around 1984, producing a protest at the Libyan embassy. The same group somehow "produced the goons" who shot policewoman Yvonne Fletcher at that protest. And the JSU promotes deadly violence as a replacement for justice, as well as violating human rights in general.

These are the serious allegations I'd need some evidence for. Seriously - that's heavy stuff to just state as fact without any support. So in answer to the question to Rolfe, yes, we could use some clues.

Now IF the Student Union has been involved in any such thing, at any time in any branch, the question still exists of Mr. Swissy's personal involvement or complicity in any of it up there in Scotland. And even if that can be shown (which I doubt), villain Swissy's ability to control and steer JFM after his departure from it hasn't been explained.

Nor has Suilman or anyone ruled out a non-Gaddafi origin for any of the well-founded questions aired about the verdict. Yet even without taking this basic step, in his fevered imagination, everyone who sees things differently is part of a vast conspiracy emanating right from Tripoli by unseen, perhaps magical avenues.

But there's more suspicious activity to prove it! Signs of a cover-up on our end!

(1) The Justice for Megrahi Campaign was co-founded by an officer of the Jamahiriya Student Union, who was also actively recruiting support in Gaddafi's media, on behalf of his Scottish comrades.
(2) JFM Co-Founder Abdullah Swissy, can also be found in Gaddafi's media calling upon "The Sons of the Great Revolution," to join his work for Megarhi.
(3) The JFM co-founder had disclosed on Gaddafi's media that he works in coordination with another Swissy, who is possibly a relative but definitely identified as the Consul General in Scotland.
(4) The JFM, through its co-founder Mr. Abdullah Swissy, was presenting itself in Gaddafi's media in a manner that is inconsistent with what they feed to the Western media as "basic tenets" of their campaign. Evidently, the JFM customizes both its message and its tenets to suit the local audience.

This part sounds detailed enough I'd credit it, but a link or something would still be handy to see the context. Points one and two seem to be the same thing - Swissy used unspecified Libyan media to promote the JFM cause. Wow. Point three is mildly interesting, not that his dad or uncle working in the diplomatic service there goes far towards making him a terrorist or pawn of anyone. But it could raise eyebrows. Point 4, and maybe 3, are perhaps clues why he left the group, but otherwise pretty irrelevant.

And then some other points:

(5) What is left of the JFM Committee and Mr. Larson are trying to sweep their association with the Jamahiriya Student Union under the rug, leaving it unmentioned even in the pretense of documenting their history.

http://www.justiceformegrahi.com/ Current page, not cached. Oh my, this isn’t being kept very secret at all. In fact, Suliman might benefit from asking himself if he's exposing anything at all?

(6) And in his own contrivances to misinform the public, Mr. Larson doctored up his blog so as to erase his prior highlighting of Mr. Swissy's co-affiliation with JFM and the Jamahiriya Student Union, and he replaced it with an emphatically childish statement to the effect, "Look, Ma, no Libyans!"

(7) Mr. Larson deliberately puckered his lips, went out of the way, to credit Mr. Swissy solely with a statement issued by the JFM campaign as a whole.

(8) Mr. Larson also created a Category for Swissy in his blog, and it remains there now--but not for long--even though it points to no mention whatsoever of Swissy. All mentions of the JFM co-founder have been sanitized, but Mr. Larson forgot to burn all the evidence of his suck-up theater. How pathetic can a brown-nosed prospector be!

Clearly I contend "misinform the public," childish, and just about every other word of that. I do recall taking Swissy, Megrahi, all Libyans and those hired by them from the big quotes list to purify it to "people who at least presumably should have no ulterior motive to express such doubts" about the highly questionable verdict. The "quote" I had for Swissy prior to that was in fact a statment he only signed in agreement with rather than something he said personally. I'm sorry to have been so amazingly deceptive with that. Or that Suliman is so easily confused/deceived, or has such a need to keep acting like it. Terribly sorry for whichever of those it is.

The one post that had a stray "Swissy A" tag, honestly, I don't remember mentioning him in it. But he might have come up in that originally, before I removed him, for some stupid reason related to his un-signing. Can't put it back if I don't remember what it was. Tag removed, as Suliman predicted, but another post - this one - takes it over. Anyone who clicks it will be assailed with Suliman's accusations, introduced above and fleshed out below by he and I. We'll discuss:

a) the supposed track record of brutality of this group "partnered" with the Justice for Megrahi campaign,
b) in addition to but not in place of a), any evidence of a functional JSU/JFM partnership as opposed to a brief one-person membership cross-over.

How's that for burnt evidence swept under the rug?

Abu Elias: Guarded by Power?

2011-03-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

6 October 2010
last update 10 October

Abu Elias was a potentially central figure in the actual bombing of Pan Am 103, a supposed nephew of PFLP-GC founder Ahmed Jibril. Some evidence says he may well have slipped through the police dragnet called Autumn Leaves, ferrying the "fifth device" that may ultimately have gotten onto Pan Am 103. This is largely based on the second-hand account of Marwan Khreesat via an FBI agent (best explanation here), and is open to question. For the sake of exploration, however, I've chosen to proceed as if Khreesat's tale of Abu Elias is true.

In my first post on his post-Lockerbie history ended with the credible allegation that Abu Elias was now living in the United States. Member of Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the South of Scotland, Christine Grahame, revealed this in parliamentary session, citing legal documents secured by Megrahi's defense team. She said he was living under the name Basel Bushnaq, who's listed as residing in Reston Virginia, near the nation's capitol and the monument to the victims of flight 103 at Arlington cemetery.

I still don't know what to do with that allegation, but toss it aside reflexively I cannot. A second post on name analysis suggests nothing concrete, but offers some reason to wonder. Basel, meaning "kingly," is evocative of Abu Elias' original true name, Kaisar (meaning, of course, Caesar). Bushnaq is a legitimate Arabic family name, meaning Bosnian/Bosniac, but coincidentally it's also the only Arabic name with "Bush" in it. The data I've collected on Bushnaq starts suddenly in mid-2001, with nothing before.

I've gathered additional information on Mr. Bushnaq, none of which has forced me to rule out what Ms. Grahame said over there in Scotland. Some of it is personal enough I should continue sitting on it, but some is publicly available and widely seen already. In general, online commentery under his name (or variant BaBushnaq) suggest a background in Syria, a nuanced view of the Baath party, animosities with the Muslim Brotherhood, and no particular religious fervor. This could well be consistent with Abu Elias - a conservative Lebanese Christian working in a mainly Muslim milieu.

In 2008, the Investigative Project on Terrorism captured on audio “jailed former leader of the American Muslim Council (AMC), Abdurahman Alamoudi, expressing his support for Hamas and Hizballah.” Mr. Bushnaq commented, on October 15 2008:

“American system was too good for him. He lived in fancy house in Virginia paid for from contribution money he used to collect from Saudi Arabia and Golf countries. He used all privileges of freedom of speech and movement.
[...] Eventually he could not hide his real mission; influenced by emotional moment, he disclosed his reality in public. [...] I am happy that this episode of crime and terror is over, hope he will learn in jail the minimum amount of decency.” [source]

Just after Megrahi's release from prison on 20 August, 2009, the "Lockerbie bomber" publicly threatened to name the real bomber. On the 23rd, the Sunday Express (Scotland) published an e-mail from an unnamed suspect “X” who had reportedly been Abu Elias. They had asked him if they could publish his name, and Bushnaq responded:

“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.”[source]

On September 2 Christine Grahame named this mysterious suspect anyway, in open session. Bushnaq was immediately contacted by Channel 4 News, via his Facebook page, and made a comment that was seen across much of the UK and parts of the world:

"It has been brought to my attention that she has been repeating allegations against my name. I suggest that she stops this unless she has solid legal ground. It is not advisable to (go) recklessly slandering others, especially when this comes from MSP."[source]

One might expect a sudden change of tone from Mr. Bushnaq following this unsettling and unexpected episode. And in fact, the next “comment” I’ve found, from ten days later, is rather peculiar. On September 12, Bushnaq joined a site called “Mepeace,” apparently a Middle East peace-oriented Myspace knock-off, with Arabic and Hebrew lettering. Immediately after joining and thus declaring he was peace, Bushnaq posted the following photo and caption:

Peace must be guarded by power.

As far as I can tell that was his purpose for joining; his meager activity at Mepeace lasted but two days after that. It does have a slightly chilling effect. The same photo has been used since for his Facebook and Twitter avatars at least, where additional clues might reside. (indeed - the post "Bosnian in What Way?" starts there)

Rats, Sinking Ship, etc,

2011-03-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

On Abdel-Jalil's "Revelation"
February 26 2011

In the last week or so, as everyone now knows, the Gaddafi regime in Libya has started falling apart. The Facebook Arab revolutions of 2011 have spread to Tripoli, and the colonel for one is not stepping aside demurely. Many hundreds or even a few thousand are now dead in by far the harshest response yet, with fighter jets strafing peaceful protestors, we hear reported (or at least suggested).

And then, somehow, the peaceful protestors have also come into control of half the country. Gaddafi and his sons have sworn to fight to the bitter end, “martyred” in a possible “civil war” Washington is still calling “protest.” Anyone else feel like we’re missing something here?

As it so happens, all this has coincided on my end with being swamped with urgent things that haven’t given me the time to catch up or comment. But I don’t have much of value to say on the situation in Libya anyway, now or in the past. I’m not deeply informed on the facts of the regime itself, and not sure how much of the track record of murder, repression, and terrorism leveled is actually true.

It’s standard form for revisionists to clarify how wicked and brutal Gaddafi is, but I only know what I’ve looked into so far, and the evidence suggests Libya was framed for perhaps the largest act among them, the bombing of Pan Am 103. So I’m confident the evil of the regime is exaggerated by at least that hefty margin. Otherwise, I’ll defer to the consensus that what’s happening there is a taking out of the trash, framed for Lockerbie or not.

But for the record numbers of new viewers visiting the Divide in recent days, I should finally comment on one bit of this that’s germane to my areas of study. It was prophesized by an anonymous commentator at professor Black’s Lockerbie Case blog on the 22nd:

What’s the betting that, sometime in the next few weeks, the following happens:

1. In the burned out ruins of a Libyan government building, someone finds definitive documentary ‘proof’ that Libya and Megrahi were responsible for Lockerbie, and/or

2. A Libyan official reveals, ‘we did it’.

The official case is now so thin that only such concoctions can save it (although it’s also crossed my mind that a prisoner will come forward who says ‘Megrahi confessed to me' – another hallmark of paper-thin cases). [source]

Two days later we learned that it was already coming true. Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, Libya’s Justice Minister, had resigned over the regime’s response to the protest/war, and suddenly revealed a dark secret he implicitly had held for years. He told this to a reporter from a Swedish newspaper, Expressen, in an unnamed Libyan city as the regime started crumbling around him. As translated for the UK Daily Fail:

“I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie.” [source]

This is nothing new to most people. The whole motive was supposed to be revenge for the death of Gaddafi’s adopted baby daughter in the U.S. air raids of 1986 that were meant to kill him. And being autocratic Libya, if any Libyan agent did anything in response, it was obviously complied with orders from on high.

The “if” part is key. The obvious and glaring problem with his “revelation” is that is claims proof of a plot that there otherwise isn’t even any credible evidence for. Further, as even the Fail noted, “He did not give details of this evidence.” I’d add that he probably never will. Mr. Abdel-Jalil’s supporting reasoning is not promising either. As the Fail reported, he said the following:

“To hide it, he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland.”

Hide it? Like the world would forget about their accepted guilt for such a heinous act if the man convicted was simply moved? Most people had already presumed that it ran to the top, and just the suspicion of it had Libya sanctioned heavily for eight years.

The only thing really changed with Megrahi’s move, aside from the relative lack of punishment, was the abandonment of his second appeal of conviction. There was nothing in the appeal papers about proving Gaddafi ordered the bombing. It was in fact all about how his supposed agent for that attack clearly didn’t do it – nearly the opposite.

And as far as “everything in his power,” the Fail’s story has an interesting take. They note that the eventual avenue home was compassionate release “on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and would die soon.” Did Gaddafi engineer the cancer? Of course not. “He is still alive,” they note, suggesting the grounds are faulty and the cancer perhaps fake. In context, the inference is that Gaddafi managed the early prognosis with bribes, to get his man home in order to somehow “hide” that he had ordered the Lockerbie bombing.

And why weren’t the Libyans concerned with hiding their role in the bombing at the time of the bombing itself? According to the official story this clown supports, Megrahi chose to fill his bomb luggage with Maltese clothes he bought himself, brand-new, at a small shop that serves few Arabs. He was the only customer at the time, and quite conspicuous, coming in right at closing and forcing the shopkeeper to stay open late for his notably random and suspicious shopping spree. Naturally, he was remembered when a tag on some pants was followed from the factory right to the shop where the alleged brainfart occurred.

For the IED, Megrahi or whoever chose to use the only radio in the world just made “theirs” when a company linked to the JSO (Libyan intel agency) largely cornered the market for it. They filled this JSO radio with a Semtex bomb running on a MST-13 timer, only 20 of which ever existed, all held by the JSO, we hear. The one advantage to offset the MST-13's traceability is that it could easily be set, like any number of other timers, to hit the giant target of the Atlantic ocean and bury the clues. But they chose to set it for 7:03 pm, when Flight 103 was, and was scheduled to be, twenty minutes from even the edge of open sea.

As set up before delivery on December 21, the fabled Libyan bomb bag was set to explode over land and lead investigators right to the perps in at least three amazingly precise ways. And there was no shortage of planning time - Megrahi waited for nearly three years to get this comeuppance, until just after the Iranians had sworn in-kind revenge for an airliner of theirs we shot down. (It also just so happens one of the bomb the Iranians had commissioned for this went missing weeks before the bombing, and had a style that would detonate exactly when the Libyan bomb on Flight 103 did, if it had been used. Small world!)

In addition to perfectly mimicking the revenge Iran never got, that bastard al-Megrahi might well have consciously framed himself and thus his country with his sloppy plot. If Jalil’s account and that ridiculous case argued at Camp Zeist is true, Gaddafi could only want the bomber back to strangle him. But he had the whole 1990s to do that, and as noted with outcries everywhere, the idiot who mucked up the mission was enshrined in a crystal palace for his final (years?). Something doesn't add up here.

The Daily Fail again:

If what Mr Abdel-Jalil is true, it would undermine the long-held scepticism by some in the UK that Libya and al-Megrahi were responsible for the outrage.

That’s a big if, and no. His story sews up nicely only with the paper version, where a word – guilty – defines things. The skeptics are focused on the 3-D version of the attack that actually killed people. That leaves signs that have always pointed away from Libya, and still do (Of course as we've seeen, some clues do point to Libya, but with far too many exclamation and question marks). Just because some guy in a desperate situation says something contrary does not change the evidence behind this case one bit.

If what Mr. Abdel-Jalil says were somehow true, it would suggest this:
1) Gaddafi, personally, ordered Megrahi, personally, to bomb Flight 103, or some American plane.
2) Megrahi was on Malta the day of the bombing, which is a stupid place to bomb a plane from, and has no credible evidentiary link to the bombing. He failed to follow through, after all the orders and investments, just as someone else was planting a brown hard-shell suitcase in AVE4041 up in London at about 4:30.
4) Megrahi was framed anyway, with obviously planted evidence and bribed witnesses.

That is clearly absurd, but he says he has proof of the first part. Clearly he's distancing himself from what he sees as a sinking ship, and he’s not swimming. He’s got this floatation device to reach a Western shore and bargain for asylum. As usual, such a device is filled with hot air, and floating on this one we see only a frightened and damp rat, stuttering out just what the West wants to hear.

This inflammatory and well-timed “revelation” has been widely re-broadcast, and so will make a deep impression and strengthening the fuzzy certainty over this case that grips the public mind still. I predict we’ll never see this “proof,” and perhaps 1% of the outlets running these stories now will ever run the proper follow-up article, “ex-Libyan justice minister shown to be a suck-up and a fraud.”
---
Update: Please see Ian Bell's excellent analysis of this situation. He's done it like I would have if I'd known of the second damp rat with the same allegation, and other disturbing similarities between them suggesting they're less frightened than tapped into something big behind the scenes (the something we're missing).

Update March 1: Nor seeking asylum geographically - the distancing is from the old order only, and towards the new. Mustapha Abdel-Jalil has been made the head of the new alternate government of "free Libya," laying out an ambitious national program and vision (drafted with amazing speed unless it was started before the revolt). He's rejected (overt) foreign help, and predicted with Libyan hands alone Gaddafi would "go like Hitler." And in another interview, he clarified the "to hide it" part of his Lockerbie claim, clarifying that Megrahi blackmailed Gaddafi, threatening to reveal the very role that, again, was presumed all along. This proves to many that Megrahi blackmailed Gaddafi to bribe the prison doctors to trick Kenny MacAskill into releasing him. Rube Goldberg would be just as proud of that as he would be Megrahi's bombing plot from Malta.

And further, contrary to the gist of what was found at Camp Zeist, Megrahi didn't actually do the bombing, we learn from Jalil. The convicted "Lockerbie bomber" was only "involved in facilitating things for those who did." Despite being nonsense, this too is being taken as literal truth by many, supported by a renewed "revelation" from Abu Nidal Org. terrorist Abu Bakr that Gaddafi ordered it all, the ANO was involved, and Megrahi oly peripheral. What the hell is going on here?

Toshiba RT-SF 16 Radios and Libyan Guilt

2011-03-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Undated
last edit March 1 2011

It was forensically determined that the model of radio carrying the bomb that brought down PA103 was a Toshiba RT-SF16 BomBeat radio cassette player, a small black-cased unit with twin-speakers. The radio was identified, in an often bizarre process as it's recorded, by fragments of circuit board and melted case plastics found blasted into surrounding clothes and luggage. And it was confirmed by fragments from the paper user's manual, one a full sheet pronouncing the model plain as day, torn up badly by the thousands-degree Semtex supernova a few inches away (below, left).

That last find, called PK/689, is just too much. Decky Horton thought it had been completely intact when she turned it in, and said so under oath at Camp Zeist. It's been explained the damage to the sheet might have been from forensics testing, and the bomb, apparently, did just about nothing to it.

The science was said to find the manual was not folded at the time of blast, meaning it was outside its narrow box, perhaps way out amongst the clothes. That becomes a bit more plausible. But then why were other bits of the same manual blasted into the blue babygro thought to be wrapped directly around the bomb radio box? Of all the fishy clues that suggest planting, this fishy plant would surely grow the most fish if planted.

These clues appeared to me before the context. I was asking why it had to be the RT-SF16 that wound up in the rubble, to necessitate something so obviously foul? The answer I found is put forth by, for example, the esteemed Richard Marquise, onetime overseer of the FBI's investigation. In a "letter to" Lucy Adams, Marquise pointed out how the model of radio itself indicates Libyan guilt:

"It was a senior Libyan official who had ordered the majority of all the Toshiba radios similar to that which carried the bomb. This official also talked in 1986 about putting a bag on a British or American flight from Malta. Ask why?"

As for the talk of bombing planes, Mr. Marquise will be aware that was a dubious claim of desperate defector A.M. Giaka. The official referred to is Said Rashid, head of JSO operations section, who "asked" Giaka himself - a driver for the JSO - to write a report about bombing planes. It's clearly a rubbish claim, among those first offered on the FBI's boat in mid-1991 in order to win witness protection for him and his wife and impending baby. It was dismissed by the Zeist judges, along with Giaka in general, and virtually everything else he said.

As for Rashid's company's purchase of the radios in question, another unbiased expert, Lord Advocate (prosecution) for the Scottish Crown at trial, Lord Colin Boyd, said in remarks on 28 August 2001:

"As if in confirmation of Libya's involvement during the preparation for the trial evidence was obtained from Toshiba which showed that during October 1988 20,000 black Toshiba RT-SF 16 radio cassettes, the type used in the Pan Am bomb, were shipped to Libya. Of the total world-wide sales of that model 76% were sold to General Electric Company of Libya whose chairman was Said Rashid.

Accordingly, its clear that the move of interest by investigators away from the PFLPGC and towards Libya was as a result of the evidence which was discovered and not as a result of any political interference in the investigation."

October 1988, just two month before the bombing, they made sure to conspicuously corner the market on the exact radio they'd turn into a bomb. Not wise, unless you're framing yourself. Some confirmation of the Libyan BomBeat connection did come from the trial:

"Two employees of Toshiba confirmed in their evidence that their company had supplied 20,000 Toshiba RT SF 16 Bombeat radio cassette recorders to Libya in October 1988. It is alleged that the bomb was contained within such a cassette recorder." LTBU daily report, 26 July 2000

Well that certainly depends on how pure the evidence itself was to begin with. But if we accept this claim, there would seem to be a rough correlation - all things being equal - that if you find a SF-16, it's about 76% likely to be JSO-owned, at least until it was stolen from them. That still leaves a 24% rate of non-JSO probability, and of course all things are not equal.

So the allegation per Lord Boyd is that the Libyans first branded this one radio model - and its amazingly durable manuals - as JSO material. And then they made one of those, of all the models on Earth they could have chosen, into a bomb for such a major operation. And they'd do this using a highly-identifiable and exclusive timer set so it would blow up over land and leave the clues to find. Including the conspicuously purchased Maltese clothing tied right to Megrahi. Packed in the case the Giaka "saw" Megrahi holding the day before the bombing. Sent through three airports unaccompanied but without a single trace at the one airport of them that had excellent security and delivered all their evidence.

It's an insane plot, and standard fare for this investigation. Another stupid move by the villains or, depending on your point of view, another sign of frame-up, with no opportunity to lost to emphasize the direction. Libyan-exclusive everything. I don't think that's normally how terrorists work when they're writing their own script.

"But Flight 103 was Behind Schedule..."

2011-02-24T19:03:00.000-08:00

December 31 2010
lat edits Jan 3 2011

Note throughout: This post, text and graphics, are imprecise and not fleshed out with detailed research. The concepts are general enough, however, that this is acceptable. Do see beneath comments from Rolfe, who has looked at this better and offers more in a few long submissions.
---

"But Flight 103 was Behind Schedule" is one of the most persistent myths of the Lockerbie bombing. It's the standard answer when anyone asks why the Libyans set their timer so early. For example, the BBC Conspiracy Files episode on the bombing (2008) starts out:

In the end, it came down, as most things do, to a simple twist of fate. 600 seconds. That's all that was in it. Had the bomb which destroyed the Pan Am exploded just ten minutes later, the plane would have been over open water, and all the evidence most likely lost at the bottom of the sea. But as it was, the bomb blew up over land, and the small town of Lockerbie became a by-word for the worst act of terrorism ever to take place in Britain.

A montage of the effects is shown, and the next words, curiously, are: "the investigation turned on one tiny piece of evidence ... this fragment [shown, of an MST-13 timer] was the breakthrough that cracked the case." The time of explosion over land - 7:03 pm, just 38 minutes after takeoff - wasn't caused by "a simple twist of fate." It was a time set intentionally on a timer to achieve the goal of destroying the plane and, we've always been told, ditching the evidence at sea.

Of course the twist of fate in mind is the fabled delay in take-off that supposedly made the jet miss its date with anonymity. The show specified ten minutes from the coast, suggesting a delay of at least that, if this interpretation is of any value.

First, if it is of any value, it isn't much. Consider the large span the plane was to take - crossing the entire Atlantic, on a northern great circle path from London to New York, something a bit like the image below. It was first to be vectored out over the northern length of Great Britain, a standard route for this flight (see below). After this long pass over Airstrip One, there followed thousands of miles, several hours, of nothing but deep, icey ocean passing beneath. A host of minutes, aside from 7:03, were there to pick from between Novia Scotia and the original Scotland, ideally somewhere way out there between them.

Instead we learn the plane was ten minutes from the coast and the plotters had aimed for the coast. By the official story, they had an immense picture window of opportunity available, but they aimed only for just over the lower sill, and missed. It's a simple enough concept no picture is needed, but in case anyone wants to double-check the scale and how easy it is to hit that window, there it is. Put simply, green is smart, orange is stupid. Official story supporters clearly think nothing of the intelligence of the Libyans who they believe planned out the murder of so many Americans.

But was the plane behind schedule at all? Excerpt from the trial transcripts, speaking with air traffic controller Ronald Brown, Day 1, May 3 2000. [pp 154-158]

A [...] "1800" is the planned departure time of this flight.
Q What exactly does a planned departure time mean?
A The time at which an aircraft is expected to shut its doors and be ready for -- to make its
departure.
Q Now, I take it it's not the same time as the time that it actually takes off from the ground?
A It's not the same time as it would take off from the ground. It is the time that the aircraft is expected to shut its doors. It will then have to request start-up clearance. It will then have to start its engines. It will have to get taxi clearance and -- before it can possibly take off.

The plane then "departed" - pushed away from the gate - at 6:04, four minutes behind schedule. The feeder flight PanAm 103A was fairly late in arriving, and threatened to delay the whole operation. This flight was carrying about 1/4 of 103's passengers and luggage - including the bomb, we were told - but this was managed swiftly and flight 103 was only the slightest bit behind schedule at this point.

It did take 21 minutes then, including a second last-minute loading at a separate gate, before wheels up at 6:25. That may have been slightly longer than average, but not by much from my limited airport experience. It should easily have been foreseen by any sane plotter. But the Libyans aren't sane, we've been told, and must have simply confused departure with takeoff time, aside from presuming no delays. This must be what caused them to hit so far below the windowsil - a full 25 minutes in this case.

Otherwise, it's worth wondering if the blast timed to be over land really was a fluke. Did the plottes set it up that way? Maybe they wanted to be found? Nah, that sounds stupid. No wonder no one has argued that yet.

To establish the flight Path across the UK, I return to the conversation with ATC Brown:

Q And then A20 route?
A It was a low level airway from London Heathrow going through a reporting point called
Trent, which is TNT.
Q And then, "upper alfa 2 Pole Hill UB for [156] Margo direct Glasgow."
A That's the route that the aircraft would continue to take. After Trent, it would proceed via Upper Humber 2, via Pole Hill, upper Bravo 4 to Margo, flight direct from Margo to Glasgow, and then follows the upper air route 590 to 59 north and 10 west.
Q And then we see, "/ mach No. 0.84." What does that refer to?
A As it crosses the oceanic boundary and comes under oceanic control, the separation on
the ocean is made by reference to a mach number rather than a physical speed and knot.
And therefore the aircraft had planned to fly at mach decimal 84.
Q Mach being the speed of sound?
A Mach being the speed of sound.
Q And then "estimated elapsed times," what does that refer to?
A The estimated elapsed time in number 5 are -- it takes him one hour 24 minutes to get to
10 degrees west. To 20 west is two hour nine minutes. To 30 west is two hour 47 minutes.
So it's cumulative times as it proceeds across the north Atlantic.
Q Thank you very much.

Some posters at the JREF forum helped me sort this out [link]. Something like a great circle-based fight path, still standard today, but from local weather problems arcing around Ireland, northeast across Great Britain to its rocky far corner. The flight plan passes roughly over Glasgow and, as "Rolfe" noted, nearly over the fabled Isle of Skye. This is my own rough graphic, tracing what others had found and noted. ATC Brown mentions the coordinates 59N and 10W. I fudged the path a bit north of the paths traced from, but it's still a bit south of the 59 line. So this is only approximately the spot to mark as a planned 84 minutes out.

But in general terms, we can see that Flight 103 would not be over even the loosest sense of ocean until approximately one hour after leaving ground - over 20 minutes later than it did, as opposed to the "600 seconds" cited by the Conspiracy Files.

Ocean would come sooner on a more southerly path, also standard. But 38 minutes out from expected take-off, marked here with a faint arc, is only over southern Scotland or Northern Ireland, depending. The orange smudge would be at least partly over land no matter the exact route, set for 7:03 like that.

And further, one would be a fool to just pinpoint the coastline. Clearly deep water is preferable to shallow coastal waters for hiding evidence, but more importantly, one should think in three dimensions and consider what six miles of elevation and air movement within it can do. Prevailing inland winds and early scatter of some bomb debris, giving the farthest spread to some of the best clues, could be foreseen. What happened over a small patch near Lockerbie left a trail of evidence extending tens of miles east clear across Scotland into northern England and to the North Sea (orange in image). Ironically, the only evidence delivered to Neptune would have been on the other side of the land. One would want to clear the last shore by at least that width to keep everything over the ocean.

As we started out, there is no reason not to aim for somewhere closer to above the mid-Atlantic ridge. But if one is impatient and needs the bomb to blow right after passing through three airports undetected, around the edge of the map is about the earliest point one should have aimed for. Even that is hoping for only slight delays, but considering effectively none, they undershot by a good 30 minutes at least. Stupid Libyans.

Stupider than you can know, we've been told in different words and even in "forensic science." They were using one of the most exclusive timers ever to fail with, a unit that pointed right to them and had blabbermouth Bollier fused into the story. A 1/2" miracle fragment of the MST-13 survived and fell on land, just as programmed. And they used a radio for their anonymous hidden bomb that, among all models on earth, was perhaps the only one to be associated mostly with the Libyan market. Several fragments of casing, circuit board, and the paper manual cover survived and fell on land. And the brown suitcase that witness Giaka saw the accused with the day before the bombing held all this together along with the clothes that Megrahi bought on December 7, brand new at a small shop that doesn't usually cater to Arabs. He did this at and past closing time, to maximize the memorability of his 6-foot-seeming frame looming over the Maltese man, together hallucinating rainfall in the shadow of confusing Christmas lights.

And they put this all, with the umbrella, into one spotted package, and opted to just drop it all on Scotland at 7:03. Or so we were told.

Or, for those who aren't aware of what this early 38-minute detonation means, vis-a-vis a more rational explanation, see the post Thirty-Eight Minutes. The time was selected by a combination of crude devices, designed of necessity, and relying on the friggin' Semtex-H blast to destroy all clues. This most likely did happen, prior to other clues (see above) replacing them well after the fact.

Harry Bell's Eight Reasons

2011-02-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

December 27 2010

(Props to "Pete" for bringing this to my attention)

DCI Harry Bell, head Scots police investigator on Malta, made an important entry in his police diary on February 15 1991, the day of Tony Gauci's selection of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's photo. In it, he says that his boss, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) Staurt Henderson, "agrees we have a partial identification on the person named Abdelbaset considering all of the circumstances," which he then lists. These eight reasons, in support of Gauci's point, suggested to him that Megrahi was in fact the buyer of the clothes that wound up in the bomb suitcase. [Source: Grounds of Appeal PDF, p 42/43 - unearthed by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and supplied to Megrahi's defense]

(1) He arrived in Malta on 7th December '88. This was the date of the purchase of the clothing.

This is a whopper of a point to begin with, considering the date of sale is almost certainly November 23, based on Gauci's best evidence. Tony described a Wednesday a few weeks before the bombing, before the Christmas lights went up, at about 6:50 pm during a light shower, with his brother watching a football game at home. All that fits only one day - November 23, and Megrahi wasn't even on Malta that day.

Even an official Scottish legal review by the SCCRC agreed in 2007 that "there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase [...] took place on 7 December." The judges had accepted it, but that decision has been criticized by serious professionals.

Consider also that in 2006 Bell himself admitted to the SCCRC just how the other date was selected despite the evidence. He ignored the lights and rainfall, focused on the less-conclusive football schedules, and got "confused."

DI Bell SCCRC interview (25-26/7/06)
"...The evidence of the football matches was confusing and in the end we did not manage to bottom it out..."
"...I am asked whether at the time I felt that the evidence of the football matches was strongly indicative of 7th December 1988 as the purchase date. No, I did not. Both dates 23rd Nov & 7th Dec 1988 looked likely."
"It really has to be acknowledged how confusing this all was. No date was signficant for me at the time. Ultimately it was [Megrahi’s] presence on the island on 7th December 1988 that persuaded me that the purchase took place on that date." [same link as above, p 229]

It wasn't the evidence (no rain all day, different game time, lights glowing across town) but Megrahi's presence that made it the day. If that's not dishonest, it is evidently wrong to then make the circular claim, as Bell did in his diary, that the established date is a separate support for Megrahi's guilt.

(2) He resided at the Holiday Inn Hotel, Sliema, which is within several hundred yards of the shop premises.

Extension of point one. He stayed there on December 7, not the day the clothes were bought.

(3) He travelled to Switzerland on 9th December 1988. He is known to Bollier, the person who supplied the IED timer.

This isn't immediately relevant to the bombing; the trial court dismissed any direct link between Megrahi and the timers. However, Mebo founder Edwin Bollier's acquaintance might be material, in that he was the first person to suggest the CIA should blame Libya, and helped them greatly in brining false charges against al-Megrahi into 1991 (see below). His information then and since is often bizarre and usually unreliable.

While the Lockerbie timer fragment is itself questionable, whether or not DCI Bell should have suspected that at the time is another story. But even if he believed these other clues, it's no excuse for mangling the date of purchase evidence like that.

(4) He was involved in the company known as ABH on behalf of the Libyans. This company was set up to deal with contact with the MEBO company, Mr Bollier's firm.

Same as above. This is an irrelevant extension of a tagential connection that doesn't prove anything about how the bombing was done.

(5) He has a resemblance to the original photo fit and artist's impression.

In the sense they both have faces with two eyes and so on, this is a good point. Otherwise, the resemblance is uncanny in its inability to match up. Five inches too short, 14 years too young, too light, too slight, with a different face and hair, and far away from there when the clothes were bought. Point five is way off mark. If the other clues support the guy, a bad sketch is no problem to ignore - they're well-known to be unreliable. But to actively cite it as a support when nothing else really sticks is deceptive.

(6) ...

We don't know what this point was or why it was apparently redacted.

(7) The SIO advises that Bollier has now been shown the photofit and he states that if the hair was shorter then it would indeed look like Abdelbaset, also if it was 10 to 15 years older.

Strangely, this is exactly the description Gauci gave of the "Czech photo" of Megrahi: 10-15 years older, with shorter hair, and he'd look like the buyer. But this is about the Photofit image, which Tony felt looked like his 50-year-old buyer (see last link). Bollier says "if it was 10 to 15 years older" it would look like the 36-year-old Megrahi. Or perhaps Bell is mixed up here.

(8) The SIO also advises that the photograph we have of Abdelbaset is in fact 12 years old. ...

Confirmation that the photo's dating served in a bait-and-switch operation on the age discrepancy. A 12-year old photo, of a man who'd have to look older by just about that, would make it a fit. But Tony still insisted the man was around 50 at the time of sale, while Megrahi was 36 at that time, so something was twisted out of form here. (That's explained a little better at the "Czech photo" link). Point 8 continues:

He is a smart dresser, plenty of jewellery and there is no recollection of the watch according to Bollier and he is taller than Bollier at 5 foot 9 inches. Gauci thinks 6 foot tall.

These fashion points are obviously weak as evidence, but the part on height is interesting. Gauci is famously short (5'3"), so Bollier is cited as a man also shorter than this tall-ish Arab, at a decent 5,8". Here that's fudged up a modest one inch and stated as taller than someone else, and it perhaps seems reasonable for stubby Tony to recall "Baset" as towering 6 feet up there, or maybe ten feet.

The wording is ambiguous enough, on review, that one who didn't know the subject's true height might conclude that a 5'9" man had reported "Baset" as taller than himself, and another had said Megrahi was six feet tall. That's important when that same man said the buyer, who the police knew could not be Megrahi, was six feet or more in height. That's one of the reasons it can't likely be Megrahi.

And that's all of the reasons he wrote down, except the missing one, and the fact of the "identification" earlier that day. Not encouraging stuff to be finding in police records, is it?

A Smoking Gun Left in Plain Sight

2011-02-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

Bedford's Bags: What They Were and Weren't
February 17 2011
last edits Feb 20

The bag that blew up
It’s been accepted for over 22 years that the explosive device responsible for destroying Pan Am 103 was within a brown (antique copper), hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, Silhouette 4000 series by its partial remains. This was eventually connected, in an extended fit of fevered imagination, to Libyan agent al-Megrahi, based at the time on the island of Malta.

The suitcase was “found” on flimsy evidence to have traveled unaccompanied from Malta, tagged for PA103, and transferred in Germany to a Pan Am feeder flight, 103A. When the feeder arrived in London at around 5:35 pm, it was decided, the death package was re-loaded into the luggage container AVE 4041, which was then loaded onto the 747 Flight 103, which took off into the sky at 6:25.

The explosion inside the Silhouette 4000 shortly thereafter caused damage to the container suggesting the case was in the lower outboard corner, apparently in the second layer of luggage. Investigators were quite certain this put it among the majority of items loaded from the feeder, but at the very bottom of that batch – just above the few suitcases loaded before the feeder landed, at terminal three’s “interline shed.”

And it’s there we find our smoking gun.

The bags Bedford saw
The plot from Malta is complicated by on-the-ground evidence at Heathrow: the report of baggage loader John Bedford. He was in charge of Pan Am’s operations at the interline shed of terminal three, where luggage from other airlines connecting onto PA flights was re-screened and loaded into containers. Employees of Alert security ran the x-ray part, while Bedford, in this case, placed the items into the “tin” in question.

Of all the cases passing into AVE4041 through the shed that afternoon, none stood out to Bedford except for a pair he reported to the police when they interviewed him in early January 1989. (see: the Bedford suitcase(s)) He described them as brown or maroony-brown, hard-sided Samsonite-style cases. That’s a remarkable fit with the primary suitcase, although apparently in duplicate.

[To clarify a side-point, I proceed here on a different assumption from most. A careful reading of Bedford suggests both mystery cases he saw were the same color and style. As he said: “They were [both] hard cases, the type Samsonite make. One was brown in color and the other one, if it wasn’t the same color, it was similar.” This plus their appearance at the same time suggests – though it doesn’t prove - a matching set from one owner, and thus both suspicious. Somehow no one else seems to read him the same way, and focuses on one of the two (the left one is specified somewhere) that matches the official style. But I go with what I see, causing the occasional disconnect between singular and plural forms below, as well as apparent complications addressed partly in this post.]

The cases appeared in his absence, Bedford said, but were vouched for by the Alert security x-ray man Sulkash Kamboj. But Kamboj himself denied this to police, and so no one can attest to seeing either one of these bags cleared for safety or placed in the container. This is in itself a minor mystery that raises some questions about what that luggage really was and how it got there.

What they weren’t: Megrahi’s luggage
A crucial aspect of Bedford’s story is its timeline. They mysterious hard-shells appeared around 4:40 pm, about an hour before the feeder 103A, carrying the fabled Libyan Samsonite, had landed in London. There’s no ambiguity possible here; Bedford clocked out right after the incident, and took his eyeballs home at 5:02, over a half hour before the feeder touched down. So clearly, neither one of the bags could be a stray sighting of that Maltese-origin packet-o-clues, which would be the third, or at least the second, brown hard-shell case accepted as going into the lower levels of AVE 4041.

What they weren’t: recovered later
The position Bedford saw the cases in was side-by-side, flat across the front half of the container floor. (see "Visualizing the Bedford story"). Unless they were moved, these would have become damaged by the explosion, accepted as centered about one inch above the left-hand twin. The bomb was powerful enough that nearly half the cases in the container, 25 out of 55 or so, showed signs of explosives damage, so clearly as they were reported, neither of the mystery cases was far enough away to escape harm.

But as the Zeist judges summed it up in 2001, “the evidence did not disclose that any fragments of a hard-shell Samsonite-type suitcase had been recovered, apart from those of the primary suitcase itself.” In fact, neither brown fragments of nor any intact cases of that style with the slightest bomb damage were found, except the one.

To explain this lack of damaged Bedford bags in the evidence, the UK Fatal Accident Inquiry in 1990, bafflingly, did nothing. The judge (Sheriff Principal), John Mowat QC, had in his evidence two brown hard-shells flat on each other, with the upper one from Malta blowing up to be recovered in bits, and the other, still on the floor … vanishing entirely, it seems.

"I am therefore satisfied that the suitcase in which the explosive device was contained was among those transferred from Flight 103A to Flight 103 […] On all the evidence I consider it is probable that bags from flight 103A were placed on top of the two interline bags lying flat at the front of the container.” [FAI 1.rtf]

This last is a clear reference to the ones Bedford spotted, although the determination gives no description of the cases that just fell through the gaps in Mowat’s logic. He did hear in the proceedings (re-read at the Zeist trial) a badgered “admission” from Bedford that the twice-affirmed “maroony brown” bag “could have been” a completely different color, blue even. It’s not clear what effect, if any, this forced appearance of vagueness had on Mowat’s decision. (the lead-up to this memory lapse, which I read as "badgering," is fascinating reading, but the voice inflection and cadence we don't now have might reveal so much more).

The Camp Zeist judges, in their 2001 Opinion of the Court [PDF] fared a little better with explaining its absence from the pool of damaged luggage. They accepted Bedford’s original report on the color of the mystery case, but speculated that it “might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container” just before the re-loading from 103A. It’s a neat thought, but only the upper corners are remote enough to work when half the luggage in there wound up damaged. And those spots obviously were not available until the end of loading from 103A.

Further, there’s no reason to rule out a move to the near corner, just a few inches away, where a case just like that blew up.

Further, the judges’ speculation founders on the fact that apparently no non-damaged case that could fit the description turned up either. The best they could do was say this:

“[W]hile the forensic evidence dealt with all the items recovered which showed direct explosive damage, twenty-five in total, there were many other items of baggage found which were not dealt with in detail in the evidence in the case.”

If the prosecution could find and explain the non-damaged, non-explosive Bedford bag(s), anywhere in the police records, the judges would have heard about it. Yet they’re left having us presume such a case must have been buried by oversight in that quiet bone yard.

Simply put, the investigation and the trial judges accept with bland resignation that the maroony-brown suitcase(s) never turned up. In real life, things don’t just disappear when it’s convenient for them to. In the mind of SCOTBOM, or Camp Zeist, however, it appears everything is permitted in deciding what is and isn’t true.

What they were called: interline luggage
The Scottish police ruled early on that the Bedford suitcases, like all of the luggage in AVE4041 before the feeder landed, was from interline passengers on flight 103. On March 28 1989 Senior Investigating Officer John Orr told investigators gathered at the Lockerbie Incident Control Center (LICC) that:

“Evidence from witnesses is to the effect that the first seven pieces of luggage in the container belonged to Interline passengers and the remainder was Frankfurt luggage.”

“Seven pieces” included five suitcases Bedford first lined up along the container’s back (quite likely it was a few more than this), plus the two mystery cases. The "effect" that this was all interline baggage was not from "evidence from witnesses" - who all swear they don’t know where the cases came from - but from the name of the shed (interline) where the suspect bags were inserted.

The FAI and the Zeist judges, by their wording, agree in calling all pre-103A bags interline, and it’s been the blanket classification ever since. This inherently rules out a Khreesat bomb, the early suspect device built with only one take-off before it blows. If the missing one of those had interlined to London, it wouldn’t get there - it would be scattered along with a plane and its passengers on some field not far from the first airport.

But my article “After the Break-in” outlines how a Heathrow intruder in the airside area of terminal three – which had its security breached in the early minutes of December 21, by the way - could make an introduced bomb appear wherever he managed to sneak it into the flow. If he weren’t caught in the act and the items were tagged right (perhaps even with an sticker saying it was X-rayed), it would wind up looking like, for example, interline luggage. It would run the danger of appearing mysteriously and catching someone’s attention, and of course, something was noticed on December 21 that matches the bomb bag style. So that leaves us … still spooky.

What they weren’t: interline luggage
The presumption that luggage appearing at the interline shed would be interline is only natural. But other possibilities exist, so it should be double-checked before being presumed. If they really belonged there, just whom did this case or these cases, so similar to the Libyan Samsonite, belong to?

Investigators did in fact try to figure it out. Scots detective John Crawford wrote in his 2006 book about analyzing the “first fifteen of the interline passengers” to locate any possible link to the bombing. [JREF link] He said these were high-profile or secret-mission people who might be targeted, have their luggage swapped, etc. Researcher Rolfe has decided instead this was likely all of the interline passengers he looked at, only some being special targets. But these fifteen at least would have any luggage switch from “Air whatever” to the interline shed to be x-rayed and then placed by Bedford. Some of them must have gone elsewhere than AVE 4041, however, as there were no more than eight cases in there before the mystery set appeared. Apparently Crawford found no sign that any of the fifteen possessed such luggage, or it would have clearly explained away Bedford’s story.

The four “Larnaca interline: passengers,” the most targetable subset of Crawford’s list, are of special interest. Major Charles McKee, Dan O’Connor, Mathew Gannon, and Ronald LaRiviere all came in on an Air Cyprus flight, all on sensitive missions related to embassy security and hostages in Lebanon. The four were shown to have held four cases between them, with one (O’Connor’s) left off the flight and sent later to New York. [JREF link] Thus they account for three of the 5-8 bags Bedford placed along the back of 4041: A blue softshell Samsonite and two gray hard-shell cases. All three were recovered and showed signs of explosive damage, especially one of McKee’s case, which also has its own mysteries attached.

Again by the silence we can presume that among the other half of the genuine interline passengers whose cases were in 4041, none had such a case to explain the still-unexplained sighting.

What they weren’t: passenger luggage at all
We can further infer that no such luggage should have been interlined to that container from the fact that no passenger on flight 103 was found to own such a case. Sherriff Mowat issued a finding in his FAI determination that meant one thing there but becomes very interesting in the current context:

I am therefore satisfied that the suitcase in which the explosive device was contained was among those transferred from Flight 103A to Flight 103. I am also satisfied on a balance of probabilities that it was not associated with any of the passengers who boarded Flight 103 at Heathrow. This decision is based upon the evidence of Detective Constable Henderson who analysed the baggage which was recovered and those pieces which were not recovered and where possible linked each piece with the person accompanying it. He gave evidence to the effect that none of the descriptions given by relatives of the baggage which they expected the victims to have been carrying fitted this suitcase.

As Rolfe sums up: “This makes Bedford's left-hand bag very mysterious indeed. […] So if there was no legitimate suitcase answering the description of the bomb bag, what the hell was it that Bedford saw if it wasn't the bomb bag? Of course this evidence was not led at Zeist.” [JREF link] Indeed, as we've seen, the judges there did not rule them out like this, but left the impression they were innocent interline luggage. Unlike at the FAI, the Malta bag and its Megrahi genesis was well-defined by then and separated itself well enough for the judges to forgo such games.

Therefore, besides the color and style description and location, we must add another disturbing shared trait between these mystery cases and the primary one – all of them were something other than passenger luggage. That’s an important point to consider as the odds steepen into sheer cliffs.

And to state it again in shorter form, FBI lead investigator Richard Marquise, in his own 2006 book, affirms no one on the plane at all owned such a case.
Quote:

"Interviews of the American relatives as well as those who had last seen the passengers who boarded the aircraft revealed little additional information. None of them owned or had a brown hard-sided Samsonite suitcase." [p 41]

Marquise was trying, as Mowat was, to isolate the Libyan suitcase from Malta, but he’s unwittingly chased it into a closet already stuffed with one or both of the cases Bedford reported. None of these two or perhaps three brown hard-shell Samsonites was passenger luggage.

What they remain: sidelined yet relevant
The Bedford suitcases remain to this day unexplained, and equally sidelined and declared irrelevant in every conceivable way. That what he described was the bomb suitcase is the first thing one should have suspected comparing it to the physical evidence and known terrorist weaponry and motivations. All this was available to investigators before the Spring thaw of 1989, yet it was the first option British investigators denied and found against at every available chance, using whatever was at hand.

First, SIO John Orr and his people found that the larger number of Frankfurt origin items in the container (aside from the bottom) led to “balance of probabilities” conclusion it came from Frankfurt. Soon it was established that the blast was slightly too high in the container (not right on the floor) to be one of the bottom interline bags. These were incapable of being stacked or otherwise re-arranged into a slightly higher position (this has never been stated, but always implied).

Then the primary case was found by the esteemed "political scientists" at RARDE to have been on top of a blue soft-shell case from Frankfurt, which had replaced the left-hand Bedford case on the floor. This forensic “fact” was absent on Dr, Hayes' first examination in 1989, and indeed unknown to the 1990 FAI, seeming to appear only later, and supported by contradictory and suspect clues. (see “the Monster of Newcastleton Forest”)

And finally, the Malta link to Libya was established. In August 1989, an unaccompanied bag from Malta was noticed, and later it was decided Megrahi bought the clothes inside of it. Megrahi was at Malta airport as that item appeared to have left, under an alias no less, and was "seen" by witness Giaka in possession of the case. Bingo, the Bedford evidence was finally history. Too bad that construct, elaborate as it was, is now in tatters, held together only by legal convention and increasingly willful denial of reality.

And the clues that rag pile obscures suggest one coherent narrative – a Khreesat bomb loaded in London to help the Iranians get their vengeance for Iran Air 655. One of the key London clues, Security guard Ray Manly’s report of a break-in at terminal three, was completely erased by police (on accident, they say) and never considered as the debate raged over whose airport screwed up (the Brits won).

On reviewing this awkward tribal dance around Bedford’s story, it’s evident that, like Manly’s report, it would have been much easier to dance over its unmarked grave. But for one reason or another this likely smoking gun of the Lockerbie bombing was kept in the public record, in plain sight but overlooked by the eyes with power. Even as it’s been divorced from relevance to legal truth, the unusual insertion spotted at 4:40 pm may still be more than an amazing compound coincidence. It might in fact be central to the physical reality that took 270 lives two and a half hours later.
---

Their Own Worst Enemy

2011-02-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

February 15 2011
Robert Forrester, special to The Lockerbie Divide.

In a saga which, from its very outset, has been replete with such twisted logic and bizarre interpretations of evidence that it is like stumbling through a hall of mirrors in a state of terminal intoxication, the Lockerbie/Zeist case has thrown up yet another peculiar development. In the good old days of the Auld Alliance, that the Scots always wax so lyrical about, your enemy’s enemy was your friend, at least that’s how the Scots saw it. Ask the French what the alliance refers to though and they’ll probably scratch their heads and tell you that it has something to do with a pact with Czarist Russia to get back at Bismarck. The novelty of the relationship that the justice campaigners seeking an investigation into the 2001 conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi face with their detractors is that ‘the enemy’ has strangely become the campaigners’ friend. How so?

Those who uphold the Zeist judgement fall into two basic categories: media commentators and representatives of the executive and judicial arms of state power. As for those who denigrate the justice campaign in the various media, from the press to the net, they think, like Mr Frank Duggan (President of The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc) seems to, that by turning up the volume, their arguments will somehow become less factually inaccurate. Wrong. Despite having had it pointed out to him on numerous occasions that Mr al-Megrahi was not, in fact, convicted by eight judges but by three, Mr Duggan continues to assert, for reasons known only to himself, that the higher figure is correct (which conflates the number of judges at the Zeist court of fact with those presiding at the first appeal hearing). In fact, the only people to have found Mr al-Megrahi guilty in the course of one trial of fact and two appeals are the three Zeist judges (the first appeal did not deal with the sufficiency of evidence - because it couldn’t due to the failure of Mr al-Megrahi’s defence team to raise the issue - and the second was dropped by Mr al-Megrahi when he was under no obligation to do so). This is but one relatively minor factual inaccuracy that he maintains, however, until he can get even this glaring error sorted out, one must question the reliability of any, or indeed all, of his statements relating to the case. And, apparently he is a lawyer. One thing that Mr Duggan can be given credit for though, despite the parlous shortcomings in his understanding of the trial and subsequent appeals, is that at least he refers, however fallacious his analysis and conclusions, to matters relating to the case and occasionally argues around it. Nevertheless, he, like some internet bloggers who hide behind the cloak of anonymity that the net provides, has shown himself to be only to ready to indulge in the odd spot of attempted character assassination aimed at the likes of the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) Committee.

The broader group, composed of such internet commentators, is invariably reticent to become drawn on detailing what they think is right about Zeist, or dealing with the matter of the mass murder of 270 people, that the bereaved could have been sold a sop on the back of a possible miscarriage of justice and that the authorities seem to be trying their damnedest to prevent any investigation into what might have happened to give rise to so many doubts over the conviction. Instead, they have accused JFM of variously being anything from assets of the CIA and the FBI to being funded by Libya’s Colonel al-Gaddafi and a front for an Arab terrorist regime, and, most recently, drunkards even! Not sure what JFM’s alleged Muslim sponsor would have to say about that. With such a range of speculative and unsubstantiated slander to choose from and the fact that these individuals attempt to avoid the threat of exposure, they think that the normal rules surrounding the burden of proof can be ignored. Wrong. Neither JFM nor the bereaved who question this verdict are beholden to the likes of these, and what’s more, with reference to the enemy’s becoming one’s friend, such individuals, whose cranial cavities have clearly been abandoned by their brains to be replaced by their spleens, only succeed in tarring themselves with their own brush and making the uncommitted bystander with a passing interest in the case wonder if perhaps the campaigners might actually be right after all as smears seem to be the detractors’ final resort.

On a slightly different tack, another group common amongst internet critics frequently recite the mantra: “Why don’t you just grow up, haven’t you got something better to do? Everybody knows Megrahi was stitched up and that the system is irredeemably bent. In any case, an inquiry would cost millions and probably be a white wash. After all, in the grand scheme of things, expediency has served us pretty well thus far.” So, three years of work done by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and the well in excess of £1,000,000 spent on it from the public purse ought to be tossed to the four winds should it? Work which by rights should belong to the public that paid for it and who are denied sight of it because of the Scottish Government’s intransigence and apparent complicity with the Crown. No assumptions regarding corruption should be made on the basis of self-assured, armchair prejudice until proven. And above all, to sanction this type of attitude is effectively say that we’d rather not be bothered about justice if it is going inconvenience us too much. Far better to blunder through it all in ignorance of the facts and supported solely by our jaundiced views. Like it or not, miscarriages of justice do take place. How, therefore, would those exponents of this type of sentiment, and there are quite a few out there, feel if they ever found themselves banged up for something they didn’t do? One imagines, until such misfortune befalls them, that they will even blame the justice campaigners for the fact that the Scottish Government saw fit to fire through the Scottish Parliament section 7 of the Criminal Procedure (Legal Assistance, Detentions and Appeals) (Scotland) Act 2010 on the 27th of October 2010, which hands ultimate power to the High Court to accept or reject cases for appeal, thus rendering the professional and independent input of the SCCRC redundant.

And so to government. Some time last year, JFM, tongue in cheek, invited Messrs Salmond and MacAskill to become members of the campaign group. This was during the period when Senators Gillibrand, Lautenberg, Menendez and Schumer seemed to be attempting to enhance their electoral prospects at the expense of BP and the Scottish Government. Although the First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Justice respectfully declined the invitation, they have since qualified as unwitting supporters of the cause through the paucity, flaws and deficiencies of their ripostes to JFM’s challenges.

From the occasion of Mr al-Megrahi’s release in August of 2009, Mr MacAskill maintained that the Scottish Government had neither the power nor remit to set up an inquiry into the case. Wrong. On the 7th of January, the government finally admitted to its powers under the Inquiries Act 2005 thus:

“The Inquiries Act 2005 provides that, to the extent that the matters dealt with are devolved, and criminal justice is devolved, the Scottish Government would have the power to conduct an inquiry.” The Scottish Government response to the Scottish Parliament Public Petitions Committee (SPPPC) questions of the 9th of November 2010.

This massive and embarrassing climb down resulted from pressure brought to bear by the JFM petition lodged with the SPPPC in October of 2010. Mr MacAskill now claims, as the sun sets on this SNP government, that primary legislation is required to remove a secondary instrument preventing the publication of the SCCRC’s Statement of Reasons, which referred Mr al-Megrahi’s case back to the Court of Appeal.

“Separately, the Scottish Government intends to bring forward legislation to allow the SCCRC to publish a statement of reasons in cases such as Mr Al-Megrahi's where an appeal is abandoned, subject of course to legal restrictions applying to the SCCRC…….” The Scottish Government response to the SPPPC questions of the 9th of November 2010.

Precisely why is it not possible simply to remove the secondary instrument alone without having to go through the lengthy process involved in introducing new primary legislation? Truly a mystery. But just as the justice secretary claimed to be right, for a few months at least, over his interpretation of the 2005 Inquiries Act, the public is, no doubt, reassured with his current assertions concerning the restrictions on the publication of the SCCRC’s Statement of Reasons. After all, he is a lawyer. Indeed, First Minister Salmond is currently utilising the claim that should the SNP be elected in May’s general election, his government will definitely bring forward [unnecessary] primary legislation to allow for the publication of the SCCRC’s Statement of Reasons. Currently, the SNP stand a pretty good chance of losing this election, and even if they win it and they pass such legislation, the Freedom of Information Act card will doubtless be called to block its publication again. “The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.” Edmund Burke.

The Lockerbie/Zeist justice campaigners are rather used by now to delaying tactics and insults, it’s really water off a duck’s back. The Scottish Government’s 7th of January statement however is so risible it is an insult to the intelligence of a single cell life form. Who precisely does the government think it is dealing with here? And what does this say about their regard for the Scottish public. Despite being ridiculed on matters of the interpretation of law by a modest campaign group, the government maintains its confidence in the conviction. How? JFM Health Warning: the arguments here presented by the government may induce severe bouts of vertigo.

Reason 1
“The Government does not doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr Al-Megrahi. He was tried and convicted by a Scottish court before three judges.......” (Mr Frank Duggan please note: “three judges”).

Response
Yes, however, it is precisely because the SCCRC and campaigners believe that the Zeist court of fact may have fallen short of the standards expected of the Scottish criminal justice system that JFM is calling for an inquiry to be opened. We return full circle back to the beginning then.

Reason 2
“....... and his appeal against conviction, heard by a panel of five judges, was unsuccessful.”

Response
Yes, but, the sufficiency of evidence was not adequately dealt with at the first appeal and the SCCRC referred the case back to the Court of Appeal on six grounds relating to exactly that. Yet another revolution of the wheel takes us back to the starting blocks.

Reason 3
“A second appeal, following a referral from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, was abandoned by Mr Al-Megrahi. The conduct of his defence during his trial and the appeals, including his decision not to give evidence at trial and the decision to abandon the second appeal, was entirely a matter for Mr Al-Megrahi and his legal advisors.”

Response
Perhaps this is a variety of what behavioural psychologists term ‘projection’: blaming someone else for one’s own failings. What the government is doing here is excusing the fact that the case has not been fully tested in law because of a decision reached by a terminally ill man who felt that he might stand a better chance of dying at home if he dropped his legal right to an appeal when he was under no legal obligation to do so. What compounds this shameful stance is that the government is clearly perfectly comfortable in leaving the interests of justice in Scotland to be defined by convicts.

Such serpentine contortions and circularity of argument by the government are enough to make a performer at a Berlin burlesque wince with pain!

Following a second round hearing of the JFM petition before the SPPPC at a meeting on the 25th of January 2011, the petition was kept open and further questions are due to be submitted to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, the Lord Advocate and the SCCRC by the SPPPC. This means that Scotland still has an opportunity to redeem itself and show that it has the courage to deal with this matter head on. Ultimately, to reject this will cast it as afraid to attend to beasts of its own creation and have to live with a criminal justice system that has become a laughing stock. First, the government denies it has the power to open an inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005, then it fires through parliament, as emergency legislation, section 7 of the Criminal Procedure (Legal Assistance, Detention and Appeals) (Scotland) Act 2010, now it muddies the waters over the publication of the SCCRC’s Statement of Reasons. Where will it stop?

“On the mace, it says that we will have justice, integrity and compassion. No wonder the petitioners call themselves Justice for Megrahi—frankly, at the moment, there has not been justice for anybody in this particular case.” These were the words of Christine Grahame MSP speaking in support of the JFM petition at the hearing before the SPPPC on the 25th of January 2011. Justice is the thread woven throughout our society which binds its very fabric together, if our justice system is riven with doubt and suspicion, we descend into social chaos. It is down to all of us to ensure that it is one worthy of respect and that its integrity is beyond reproach both within and without our borders. So long as the executive arm of state, the judiciary and the Crown seem to persist in obstructing requests for an independent inquiry into this matter in what appears to be an attempt to protect the transient and temporal reputations of individuals, the Scottish criminal justice system will be the butt of derision and contempt. This is not a legacy that we wish to pass on to our children. Justice is a cause for pride and celebration; it is greater than any one of us and provides, through its structure and functioning, a window revealing the mind and identity of a nation.

The basic tenets of the campaign are the following:
1. We do not assert that their Lordships presiding at Kamp van Zeist were wrong in reaching the verdict that they did. However, we contend that on the evidence laid before the court, we find it incomprehensible that such a verdict could have been arrived at. Like the SCCRC then, we feel that Mr al-Megrahi may well have fallen victim to a miscarriage of justice on the ground that no reasonable court could have passed a guilty verdict.
2. We campaign to lift the doubts over the safety of the conviction which still linger painfully in the minds of the bereaved resultant from the Pan Am 103 tragedy.
3. Following the dropping of Mr al-Megrahi's appeal, his conviction has not been tested in law in the interests of justice. We, therefore, campaign to restore the stature of the Scottish criminal justice system.
An inquiry can only produce a beneficial result for our justice system. Whether it transpires or not that there were shortcomings in the investigation of the Pan Am 103 tragedy and or the subsequent legal proceedings, Scotland will be able to look itself in the mirror again without shame and say: "We tried openly and honestly to lay the doubts to rest." Taking this courageous decision is the only honourable route to go down in order to restore Scottish Justice to her rightful place in our society. To spurn this chance would raise serious doubts over Scotland’s maturity as a nation.

Whether it is the confused rantings of the self righteous President of The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc, the whispers from the ghosts in the shadows on the internet or the avoidance tactics of the Scottish Government, this all reveals only one thing: fear.

So keep the salvoes of venom saturated invective, the anonymous character assassinations and the legalistic blinds coming. We can’t get enough of them! Apart from anything else, they at least add a spot of humour to what otherwise is such a desperately depressing and sad case. We are in this for the long haul.

As someone once said: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” Those who profess to be defenders of the free world would do well to pay heed to this.

Robert Forrester.

Explosives Revisionism and "No One Did It" Theories

2011-02-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

18 September 2010
last update Feb. 13 2011

I recently asked for help with the contents of this site, soliciting input from the community, and as expected the most interest came from those I'm least inclined to agree with. I'd like to expand the voice of the Divide, but there are some things I just can't bring myself to support with publication here. Where the different theories fall relative to each other and what I accept and why is explained in part here.

Two groups of claims questioning what happened on the plane have become mixed together in my mind and jointly ignored until now. Those who propose a drastically different bomb detonation than alleged took down Flight 103, and those who say it wasn't a detonation at all, but an accident.

Inherently I agree the explosive force as stated is not necessarily correct, although I do suspect it's reasonably close. First, it's not clearly decided anywhere. The Zeist judges wound up taking away a median of 400 grams of Semtex-H, give or take 50, so 350-450. But the Indian Head forensic tests of 1989 found the container damage observed was consistent with the blasts done using between 454-680 grams, and not the lower amounts. There is reason to believe the higher end of that is closer to reality.

And more recently Dr. John Wyatt's unusual tests say that only a blast as low as 150 grams or less might possibly have have left the electonics remains investigators found. And to make PK/689 legitimate evidence, the bomb might have to be more like 20 grams.

I'm not going to argue the bomb was so small it couldn't rupture a suitcase - the clear solution to this is to suspect the poorly fitting evidence was planted poorly. But clearly there is a lot of room for fudging between the intact paper and the ruptured cargo pallet and plane.

As I recall, there are also some genuine-sounding mysteries over residue testing that seemed to suggest a different explosive than Semtex-H (or in addition to?) was responsible. If anyone is excited to explain this a bit better, feel free to do so in the comment section below. I'll try and dredge it up myself if and when time allows.

The rest of this post, however, is stuff just I don't buy. Partly because I don't trust these theories or theorists to get it straight for me, and partly because I don't know the science to be sure myself, I must call these theories worthy of discussion - in the comments section below and nowhere else on my blog (until further notice anyway).

John Parkes on the bomb's power
As reported in Scottish lawyer's magazine the Firm, August 2006.

John Parkes, an explosives engineer present at the crash site in December 1988, who reported damage indicating the carriage of munitions on the plane. Parkes helped in the rescue operation when the Boeing 747 came down on part of the town, killing 259 on board and 11 on the ground. He claims wounding he observed on three bodies recovered from the crash site, and on one young female victim in particular, were not caused by Semtex-based explosives as claimed in the trial.

"Every munitions or explosives device has its own characteristic signature," Parkes says. "The signature I saw was not consistent with the device they maintained was used. There was not enough power or heavy material around that device to have gone through the luggage and floor and through the back of an aircraft seat to inflict these wounds."

[Dr. Jim] Swire has asked the Crown Office to explain why this testimony was not included in the Air Accident Investigation Board report, asking "whether the AAIB gave any reason for rejection of Mr Parkes's ideas, and if so what that reason might have been".

I have great respect for Dr. Swire, but sometimes...

Well, just off the top of my head, Parkes reported the injuries to a girl he felt were consistent only with explosives coming up through her seat, injuring her feet and backside. First, it's unfortunately gruesome and sad as a "smoking gun," and for obvious reasons unverifiable. Second, I'm not convinced Parkes knows what to look for in such an unusual case, and could just be confusing a tree impact after the fall with shrapnel tears from before.

We could check by looking at damage to the floor panels this shrapnel would have to tear through. I had imagined most of this would have been found, perhaps warpedby he overpressure, but not torn up. But according to the AAIB report, many floor beams were fractured and none of the panels in the immediate blast area were recovered (that they admit!). So we can't say one way or the other.

The cabin floor structure was badly disrupted, particularly in the general area above the explosion, where the floor beams had suffered localised upward loading sufficient to fracture them, and the floor panels were missing. Elsewhere, floor beam damage was mainly limited to fractures at the outer ends of the beams and at the centreline, leaving sections of separated floor structure comprising a number of half beams joined together by the Nomex honeycomb floor panels.

Admittedly, that sounds worse than I'd expect, but then again, those beams can't be too solid. Planes rely on lightness, and simple gas over pressure might break up some beams and tear some flooring loose, without ripping through it with shrapnel. To send material tearing up through several filled suitcases, the container top. bay liner, cabin floor, and the seat structure to just stop at injuring this girl - rather than slicing through her - would require a truly massive explosion with supreme control. The focused 20-inch fuselage hole just two feet from the explosion cannot be consistent with such a blast, nor the luggage container or anything in it. I can't buy that's all faked.

Different bomb location
The above theory may also imply a different location even than the missing panels, depending where the girl was seated. I don't think this was ever sorted out, as she was to my knowledge never identified to Parkes.

Then there's temper tantrum Blogger Charles Norrie and his CIA bomb on top of an Iranian one. He cites a statement from Parkes, perhaps reflecting the seating issue above, that "a minimum of two high explosive events took place inboard Pan Am 103." Norrie also points to the twin debris fields, north and south, which could have many explanations in a complex breakup like that of Flight 103,even without another bomb.

For the location of the second blast, Norrie cites a missing section near the rear cargo area which must have been all vaporized by a "brisant explosion." See the image at left (new window for larger view), of the AAIB's painted model. Those sections coded in white were never recovered. Charles would be referring to the section on the lower rear of the craft (seen in view 3). But many other sections at random spots were missing as well, in at least seven apparent "brisant explosions" all over the plane. For whole panels of aluminum to disappear in Scotland might seem odd, but there are a lot of lochs that maybe weren't fully dredged, and the North Sea's not that far off for high-drag items. Perhaps a few still linger in private collections, bought from enterprising rural Scots.

But more prominently, a number of experty people have made themselves quite sure that mathematics prove the bomb was just a foot away from where it was reported, just outside container AVE4041, rather than inside it. These include onetime AAIB investigator named Protheroe, who now says the "mach stem" effect was calculated wrongly, suggesting 25 inches was between the bomb and the airplane skin. This distance, which fits with the physical evidence of the luggage container, is supposedly trumped by his new numbers saying 12 inches. This would mean the container evidence must be faked to appear the bomb was inside it. It also suggests someone planted the device directly in the plane, rather than remotely in luggage, as generally accepted. No explanation, Just math.

Edwin Bollier started trying to sell Libyan clues to the CIA within days of the bombing, was listed as one of the three important witnesses at Camp Zeist against Megrahi. Now he champions Libya and Megrahi as "wrongly accused," with mostly bogus claims, and he supports Protheroe's 12" revisionism.

I had thought further support could be found from Canadian researcher Ludwig de Breackeleer, but thankfully not, on closer look. Most of his other work on the issue is great, and as a science guy at heart (physics), the contribution he's most qualified for questions the official blast size, which is valid. He concludes, based on actual shown math and presumptions I haven't double-checked:

As the explosion of one pound of SEMTEX H inside the luggage container does not generate a blast wave sufficiently powerful to fracture the skin of the fuselage, we have little choice but to conclude that the verdict appears scientifically implausible.

One pound being about 450 grams, that's the upper edge of what's officially accepted. Dr. Ludwig's science fits with what I already observed at the top - something significantly over that seems a better fit with the most believable physical clues. (though I'd wager not enormously higher - perhaps 150-200% of that). I'm heartened to learn this.

No One Did It
The accident theory has two variations. The first proposes an unintended detonation of military munitions being carried secretly on the plane. This is advanced by one "Robbie the Pict" in the UK.

The other proposes no explosives at all, but a failure-induced decompression, and is advocated by a John Barry Smith in the US and also I believe this was the thesis of Carl Davies, proprietor of the Plane Truth website.

Further commentary for and against these theories can be submitted in the comments form below. Any highlights I feel worthy I may pull up and include in the post.

(more text, links, etc. forthcoming)
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Update 2/13/11: I have some gripes from Robbie the Pict, which I still need to address re: the above and see if he's got a point. Otherwise, I have to revise my above take on deBraeckeleer. I hear he's been incommunicado for a couple of years now, but I didn't realize that as I tried to e-mail him recently as follows:

Dear. Dr. deBreackeleer,

Greetings. Adam Larson aka Caustic Logic of the Lockerbie Divide here. I've been appreciating your works for quite some time now, especially the interviews and original quotes. Some great work on the Khreesat and Autumn Leaves angles. I've been meaning to get in touch with you, just to see what that might yield.

I'm most interested in where your expert credential are most relevant, with your analysis of the force required to rupture the plane's hull in the first place, as explained in this article: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/8920

I have in the apparently misunderstood that article twice now, in two different ways. I just reviewed it again prior to writing, and decided I should just ask you directly what's unclear to me here. The abstract says location is the issue, and that's an issue I have some problems with.

Unfortunately for the stated goal of reaching the masses with simplicty, I have a hard time following it. Positive impulse? Critical time, wavelength, greek letters... Perhaps I should go study up on this, but actually, cutting to the last portion seems adequate for my purposes.

The outside wall of the AVE 4041 container was located at 16 inches from the skin of the plane. At this closest possible distance in the light most favorable to the original investigators, experimental data indicate that one pound of explosive will generate a positive impulse of less than 20 psi-ms against the fuselage. [27]

So from this it seems the force on the skin would be dependent on original power and distance. Correct? The force you've taken is 450 grams, which is the upper end of the range the judges accepted: 400 grams, give or take 50. Since "at this closest possible distance" is the qualifier for the inadequacy.

As this value is well below the critical impulse calculated above, namely 50 psi-ms, we have little choice but to conclude that the Lockerbie verdict is scientifically implausible.

And the AAIB decided on 25" from the hull, not 16, strengthening the point. I'd defer on what I can't verify, and concur in general. But I have a hard time seeing the blast being much closer. The luggage container appears to be blown outward in all regards, and that's one piece of evidence I tend to accept. In fact, I've never seen anyone come out and argue or allege it was faked, even as it's been implied over and over, including by an AAIB scientist himself, no less.

I'm not trying to get you endorse any theory or another, but in your scientific opinion, is it possible that the location is about as reported but the blast force was simply higher than reported? Could a wave emitted from, say, 700 grams (or maybe 900?), but from the AAIB's rough placement well inside the container, make it plausible by these same methods?

I do have some reason from other quarters to suspect the blast weight was fudged way down, in part I surmise to half-explain the manual cover and other - erm - dubious clues. The primary suitcase we've been shown might not be that at all, for one thing...

V—ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, researchers at the Center for Explosives Technology Research in Socorro, New Mexico, estimated that up to 30 pounds of explosive was needed to destroy a Boeing 747 if the explosion had occurred in the container. [28] We agree with that estimate.

30 pounds? If I could decipher it, I'd ask to see the math on that. Investigators got it wrong by a factor of 30? I would have suspected a factor of maybe 2 or 3, so as to not appear amazingly ridiculous to other scientists like yourself. Did their models have it placed in the relevant spot, or stuffed in the middle of the container, or the upper corner?

Clearly your point here is to suggest that it was not in the luggage container, but isn't that a bit hyperbolic? Maybe unwarranted?

Beyond that, if you're at all inclined after that, I'd be interested in interviewing you by e-mail for my blog. It might increase your profile a bit, give you a few new viewers. I have Slovenian viewers out my ears all of a sudden. And either way, kudos on some very valuable contributions to a worthy field.

Best,

Adam.
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David Leppard on Abu Elias

2011-02-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

February 13 2011
slight edits 2/15

I’m delighted to add a very strange new point to the body of knowledge and/or lore surrounding “Abu Elias,” the apparent builder and controller of the Lockerbie bomb. (see: all threads about Abu Elias) This latest is from David Leppard’s highly interesting riddle of a book On the Trail of Terror (April 1991). It was among the first privileged works allowed to announced the turn to Libya in detail, months ahead of the sanctions. It drew on insider sources and related - in great detail - all the relevant clues that didn’t specify al-Megrahi or Fhimah - the Frankfurt printout, the Maltese clothes, the timer fragment, etc.

In fact, the original lead from 1988-1990, the Iranian-backed plotting of the Syririan-based PFLP-GC (Jibril network), is still tied in here. That's good for Leppard because he earned his spots reporting on just that lead in 1989 and '90. After he “changed his spots,” as Paul Foot put it, Leppard’s take became the same as that proposed by CIA Lockerbie chief Vincent Cannistraro in the early 1990s. It was the same Iranian-backed PFLP-GC plot everyone had, with good reason, suspected, just taken over by Libyan intelligence following the October 1998 "Autumn Leaves" bust.

In this series of raids, the bomb-making PFLP-GC cell near Frankfurt, their massive weapons cache, and tangle of targets, was disrupted by German feds who then set almost everyone free. Only the cell's weapons master Ghadanfar and its ring-leader Dalkamouni were kept in lock-up. The bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, was a double agent and flew back to his bosses in Amman, Jordan.

This version, where the Libyans picked up the slack, modified the rogue bomb with one of their timers, and arranged for the Malta plot to send it on to PA103, was the insider’s favorite for a while. But after some time, the original portion withered and fell off for lack of official recognition or further repetition (this part, if not the whole shift, can be chalked up to Gulf War-era re-orientation). Lockerbie gradually became a Libyan plot alone, presumably motivated by the nearly three-year-old U.S. air raids on Libya. As President Bush put it in 1992 or so (from memory), the original suspects “took a bum rap” in ever being suspected.

And all this despite the Autumn Leaves bust being quite possibly irrelevant to the original plot. One of the five bombs and one of the plotters escaped the raids entirely, together it seems and moving towards something. No one has ever explained what stopped them, or what they needed any Libyan help for. All that really needed done from there was likely carried out, by whom exactly we don't know, at terminal three Heathrow between 0:00 and 17:00 on December 21.

I thought I’d already checked Leppard’s book for reference to airport security expert Abu Elias, but missed this sole entry until just the other day. In its last three pages, the book concludes with its only mention of this highly relevant fugitive, as a part of the “Libyan connection.”

One final question mark for the Lockerbie team is the identity of the man Jibril asked to liaise with the Libyans in the eight weeks between Operation Autumn Leaves and the night of the bombing. The Scots, the Germans, and the Americans now believe that after 26 October 1988, with Dalkamouni in prison, another leading Jibril operative, called Abu Elias, may have played an important role in arranging the tie-up with Libyan agents and directing at least part of the Maltese end of the conspiracy.

There’s been no other mention of, nor evidence for, this notion of Abu Elias meeting with Libyans. At least, not that I’ve run across yet. It’s a very strange way to end a book to fuse the new direction with perhaps the best lead of the old, this young relative of Ahmed Jibril’s who apparently didn't trust Khreesat. Leppard adds some details consistent with other reports that would emerge:

The FBI have a photofit picture of Elias which shows the handsome features of a blond 25-year old Palestinian who heads the PFLP-GC’s military section in Damascus.

25 years old is new to me - nothing I'd seen before gave an age. This almost certainly refers to the Jordanian GID's sketch, apparently made after Khreesat's first (and, I think, only) meeting with the mysterious operative in 1985. As the 1989 report by FBI agent Marshman says:

The GID officers produced a composite sketch of Abu Elias that was done by Khreesat some time ago. Khreesat examined the composite and affirmed that the likeness was that of Abu Elias who he met in Damascus, Syria. This composite is attached to this FD302. [source: trial transcripts]

If he were a bare 25 years of age in 1985, to head the military section in Damascus (as others report) even by 1988 is clearly young. It's a bit too young to be Basel Bushnaq of Virginia, read literally. He's allegedly the same person as Abu Elias, but his records show he was born in late 1955, making him 29 or 30 at the time of any 1985 meeting. But if that’s not his original name, as Christine Grahame MSP alleges, it’s probably not his real birth date or even year.

And perhaps the 25-year-old estimate, whoever's it was, was erred on that end. This age addition is close enough to be consistent with the other disturbing clues that Ms. Grahame might be right, but is not apparently much of a clue in itself.

Leppard continues:

Dalkamouni admitted in his prison interviews that he had met Elias at the Front’s offices in Damascus. But he has denied seeing him in Germany.

Ah! Khreesat says he never saw Abu Elias in Germany, but that Dalkamouni did, something he was told of repeatedly. Abu Elias had studied Khreesat’s work in 1987, and could perhaps spot a fake, like he was instructed by Amman to build. He might inspect the work being done for the big Iranian job.

And Khreesat says that of the five armed “Khreesat bombs” made under this threat, one was not his at all, and only appeared at the same time Dalkamouni said Abu Elias had arrived. Khreesat was asked to finish it by soldering two wires, and then it disappeared again, presumably back to whoever had brought it.

Nevertheless, the BKA surveillance report on Dalkamouni’s prison meeting with his sister-in-law in July 1989 contains a dascinating reference to Elias. After denouncing Kkhreesat as an informer for the West, Dalkamouni was overheard telling Somaia about Abu Elias. ‘He [Dalkamouni] only gave Khreesat the name Abu Elias once. When referring to this name it concerns a “Phantom” name, and only Khreesat could therefore reveal this name.’ Dalkamouni’s comments suggest that Elias played an important, although unspecified role, which Dalkamouni regretted revealing to Khreesaat., the suspected double agent. ‘It is not a bad guess to say that Abu Elias has played a role,’ said one senior Western intelligence official. But that role is remains a mystery.

That part is interesting, and may refer to a real conversation that Dalkamouni probably knew was being recorded. I’m not sure what to make of it. But investigators still felt Abu Elias was involved, or told Leppard they did, right up to the eve of the indictments, after which he vanished again. They were puzzling over his role, it’s said, but if he had one at all, it didn’t involve Libyans or Malta. That’s all 1990’s cartoon nonsense.

Whatever happened between October 26 and December 21, the bomb clearly left the ground at London. We have real evidence for that, not “intelligence sources now believe” crap. All along, they "now believed" whatever helped shift us gradually from one evidence-led track to another, led by new and more politically convenient evidence, generally oozing from Vincent Cannistraro's end of things and into media reports. And all along the real evidence, partly known to us and partly covered-up, has remained just the same. That is because the murder of those 270 people still happened the same way it actually happened. That can only be re-written on paper.
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No Laughing Matter

2011-02-13T03:59:00.000-08:00

Response to Roger Simon
February 13 2011
small edits 2/14

The following started out as a comment beneath an article by Roger Simon in the Chicago Sun Times called "Lockerbie Bomber Having a good laugh." I've fixed some typos and errors and addressed a couple more of his, in addition to the general history I laid down for Chicago's readers.
---

I’ve read Mr. Simon's article, and noticed a shedload of errors of fact and presumption that will need more correction than I have space for here. For one, Megrahi is almost certainly not laughing. However premature that prognosis was, he is by now in a coma, last I heard, and only technically alive. And the whole decade of wrongful incarceration, the cruelty of justice made a mockery for his and his family’s and his nation’s torment, has, I understand, left him less than giddy. Even after the obvious relief of going home.

When I wrote about this at the time, I asked why, if a mass murderer had only weeks to live, not just let him die in prison?

The law in Scotland says he should be released if that's the case. Like Mr. Simon, the U.S. government asked that MacAskill should break the law and force this prisoner to die in prison. Conservatives ripped on the White House for having the temerity to even acknowledge the possibility the Scots would follow the law and release him to a non-prison hospital. They insisted it be in Scotland, not Libya.

A former Libyan intelligence agent, Megrahi was arrested and charged and then used every detail, wrinkle and technicality afforded by Western justice to escape his fate.

Proceedings dragged on for years, and it wasn’t until Jan. 31, 2001, that a three-judge Scottish panel finally convicted him. Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.

Mr. al-Megrahi was arrested in the Netherlands, where he and his co-accused Mr. Fhimah had surrendered themselves in April 1999, on finally having a chance in a third country venue all parties could agree to. It was the deadlock over unreasonable demands from Washington, not the trial, that took years. Megrahi wanted to beat the rather silly charges, but feared that he'd be tried unfairly and then killed in a U.S. trial as demanded. Further, Gaddafi forbade him to go that route. So, sanctions, thousands dead, but let's just gloss over that part...

Both Libyans were in prison for over a year before the trial started in May 2000, running about eight months total, with frequent breaks. The bizarre verdict was Fhimah not guilty, mostly because everything the star witness said was a lie and even the judges said so. And Megrahi, the man with no known accomplice when he needed at least one to have done it, was indeed sentenced to life.

The wrinkles most definitely worked against him.

A life sentence in Scotland is different than in America, a point not explained in Simon's article. There, it means until you're ruled within three months of death. Even if that prognosis is flawed, it's made by the prison doctor (Dr. Andrew Fraser in this case) and the Secretary is required to release the prisoner ... after something mysterious is worked out, in this case.

What makes Simon's whining about procedures or prognoses he doesn't like any better than that of Jim Swire, Robert Black, Hans Koechler, Michael Mansfield, Oliver Miles, Robert Baer, etc., when they question the verdict reached? If the law means guilty is guilty, then dying is dying, and everyone knows no prognosis is perfect. You alleging a conspiracy? Hey, so are some of us!

But otherwise, let’s skip the specifics so crookedly scribbled into this article, and consider what it is really about. It’s full of protest, but I note that no amount of complaining will have Megrahi returned to prison now. Something else seems to be animating this.

Some of us know that the real picture behind the scenes is Megrahi’s well-known innocence of the ridiculous charges he was amazingly convicted over. The legal reality must seem the same at the physical one, no matter how tricky that is. Thus his promising second appeal, granted by the official legal body SCCRC to address its concerns of a “miscarriage of justice,” was quietly the main area of focus. Fellow Americans – never even heard of it, have you?

The Labor Brits duplicitously did all they could for a Prisoner Transfer Agreement, which, among other things, required abandoning all appeals. And the scape-goated Scots, all but entrapped into the situation, despised the PTA deal and pulled off a miracle – their own way home (“compassion”) for the “bomber,” made mysteriously conditional on an appeal surrender. Megrahi said he was led to believe that was the case, and while the SNP insist no way, he was released for non-appeal-related reasons only after - two whole days after - the appeal was dead. His own choice, for s#!%s and giggles, we're to presume.

And then back to this article and the many like it: now that they’ve served their purpose regarding Megrahi, the SNP are expendable – the stick we used to scrape some dog crap off our shoes. U.S. and U.K media are now freely serving their nations’ foreign policy goals of smearing the SNP who, coincidentally, are pursuing a program towards independence from the U.K.. That’s not something we hear much about in the states, but I suspect it’s the real reason they’re so hated. We encourage the Yugoslavias of the world to fragment, not the United Kingdoms.

Feathering the SNP in their Megrahi-tar to assist the foreign policy objective is a goal that could still be served by extended ill-iformed whine sessions like Mr. Simon’s. Serving justice is not, not when there’s such a serious likelihood the real bombers were never once caught and sent to jail for even a day, escaping under the cover our blame-Libya cartoon detour. Talk about “giving comfort to terrorists around the world,” huh?
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Video: Two Hard Cases Solve Another

2011-02-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

January 31 2011

Here is my latest Youtube video, relating the account of John Bedford and its potential relevance to the bombing.

It's not the most visually interesting, and the music's a little weird. But I think the soundtrack adds some drama to a pretty detailed narrative. I hope it all comes together well enough to raise a few new question marks - or even exclamation marks - out there.

See also the actual Youtube page for the video to help get the views up. Comments open to all here and there, welcoming constructive criticism and all. I plan to remake all my videos some day, or something to that effect, so feedback is always valued.

Debate Call: Suliman

2011-02-07T02:52:00.000-08:00

February 7 2011

This challenge is inspired by a recent string of comments at The Lockerbie Case by “Frank” (Duggan, it seems) and others. The first smears were against the blog’s administrator, Lockerbie trial “architect” Professor Robert Black. Few specifics weregiven, but it seems they were suggesting he was paid by Libya to tell lies. No proof or evidence, no lies identified.

And then smearing Dr. Jim Swire, Justice for Megrahi, and Robert Forrester, veteran anti-Gaddafi propagandist “Suliman” made a notable appearance. “Swire, Forrester and Co. should be treated as undeclared agents of a foreign terrorist syndicate, until proven otherwise.” I’ve left that issue, his "evidence", and my response, for the buried comments there. I look forward to Suliman’s speculation as to what further sinister designs this decision proves.

I'll start with the comment he started out responding to, edited slightly:

Caustic Logic said...
By omission, Suliman and the other Dugganista-types out there acknowledge these points raised by Swire, Black, et al. are darn good ones.
- Gauci's buyer was clearly not Megrahi, but he was paid at least $2 million just to let it be fudged to seem that way.
- The crucial witness Giaka was thoroughly discredited.
- The third important witness was Edwin Bollier.
- There's no normal evidence for an unaccompanied bag from Malta, strong contradictory evidence, and no known accomplice to smuggle it aboard.
- An even more rational alternative theory, apparently hushed-up and obscured by the case that did emerge.

All they can complain about is that the people raising these extremely valid points might have been paid by Libya to tell the truth. Or are perhaps compelled by some moral failings (of the type evidenced by taking Libya's settlement, which is only to reward those who toe the line, not to subsidize free thought) to probe for more accurate answers and deeper truth.

Unless there's some important unstated middle part there where the actions so inspired are themselves somehow erred or unethical.

Select responses from Suliman (in block-quotes) and my responses:

You are attempting to paint me in a certain corner, and your rationale is not anything I said but things I did not say!

Yes indeed. Any of the above. And I predict that he will continue working on the legal technicality side of this, avoiding like a plague facts of the 3-D world in which Flight 103 was physically blown up and people physically died. Of course his and others' refusal to address the facts doesn’t actually prove they know they go against established beliefs. However, the endless dodging is consistent with that, and I suspect such a fear motivates Suliman's avoidance.

What Mr. Larson and others will not touch of course is my explicit challenge to them to justify--by any means--their claims about the personal dignity of those rejecting a court ruling while accepting--voluntarily and enjoying--the financial loot that flowed from it. Go ahead, Mr. Larson, call me whatever makes you feel safe and comfortable in your escape from defending your partner Swire's dignity.

I’ll show him wrong and touch it. In itself, on a sliding scale of human "dignity," as he seems to mean it here, accepting the settlement money from people you don't believe guilty is not at the very top. Marina De Larrocochea refused it. Martin Cadman refused it. But I don't know enough of the circumstances surrounding this to judge him over it. Didn't he try to give it back but wasn't allowed?

What I see coming from Dr. Swire is generally correct, honest, and insightful. By his actions he seems sincere is his desire, despite setbacks and persistent criticism and smears, to find the truth of who killed his daughter Flora all those years ago. So I see no reason to suspect the kind of dishonesty or whatever exactly it is Suliman is suggesting lies at the heart of Swire's unpopular work. Rather, I'm half-suspecting about the opposite.

Another little-noted problem with accepting this money, if it's joined to the dichotomy Suliman proposes, is that it might bias one's public and even private view on Libya's guilt. Of the hundreds of American relatives who took the settlement, none raises a public voice about the valid questions that proliferate. Coincidence? Or has the money somehow hushed them up?

To Suliman, it seems, the epic $2.7 billion settlement is only a reward for those who toe the line, and not meant to subsidize free-thinking.

Tell me: How dignified is it to reject the court ruling and pocket the money?

How dignified is it to convince yourself (or have someone else do it?) that you’d better keep quiet about the huge lie you can faintly sense around your loved one's death? Because, after all, you profited from this version being true in the court sense. If you come to rely on that money, and accept the kind of moral dictate Suliman personifies, you'll be locked into silence. And if you break the unwritten gag order, as we can see, you’ll be smeared as a morally corrupt, money-grubbing, terrorist supporter. Mass complicity is thus purchased and enforced, intentionally or not, and the alternate reality first planned by the CIA in early 1989 remains in place.

So, Suliman, to conclude:

But at the end of your contrivances, you need to address the things I do say, not the things I don't say.

Says you, trying still to avoid being forced into the actual evidence that your villains didn’t really have anything to do with that bombing. It's a lie of admirable size, but the world is waking up to it. You just keep hitting the snooze button. Time to stop.

Count the specific facts of Megrahi's guilt you cited in that three-post screed: Gauci, Giaka, Bollier, timer fragment, 1986 bombing study, … zero. All that was a formality to get to the finish line of a guilty verdict, forever after to be the only point of reference to ever be cited. And you surely know this consciously as you do just that.

I have no gripe with your overall gripe with Libya. I don't mean to apologize for them in general on things I don't know. But on what I do know, the Lockerbie case, you've got nothing real behind the legal technicalities.

The challenge: Of the many facts that must be true for al-Megrahi to be guilty, one crucial point is the date of the clothing purchase, which can only be established from the account of the witness to the sale, Tony Gauci, compared to other reliable and accepted records. You know this, Suliman. What relevant evidence was ever adduced to support December 7 as the date?

I believe I've now addressed all of your points the best I can. What will be your excuse this time to fail in returning the favor?