RIP Archbishop Desmond Tutu

[I am saddened to learn of the death today at the age of 90 of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who was a convinced and long-time supporter of the Justice for Megrahi campaign. What follows is an article posted today on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph's Lockerbie Truth website:]

Today's sad news about the death of former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu holds a feature common to much of the media in the UK and USA. 

The selective amnesia of certain media editors is clear: Effusively praise those issues in which Tutu agrees with your agenda, and ignore those in which he opposes.

And so it is, once again, with the campaign for an inquiry into the factors surrounding the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and subsequent trial.

On the 15th March 2015 we reported that a petition had been submitted to the Scottish Parliament by the Justice for Megrahi group of bereaved relatives. That petition was rapidly and publicly supported by prominent personalities around the world. The petition, even after six years, still runs current on the Scottish Parliament's agenda.

Among those signing in support of the petition was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He proved to be a strong supporter of the imprisoned Baset al-Megrahi and a South African colleague Nelson Mandela.  Mandela's support for al-Megrahi, too, remains ignored by the main British and US media. 

On 15th March 2015 we published the following post: [Names in alphabetical order].

Campaign for the acquittal of Baset Al-Megrahi and an official inquiry into Lockerbie

A petition requesting that the Scottish authorities undertake a comprehensive inquiry into Lockerbie is supported and signed by the following world renowned personalities. All support the campaign for acquittal of Baset Al-Megrahi, who was in 2000 convicted for the murder of 270 people on Pan Am 103.

Kate Adie was chief news correspondent for the BBC, covering several war zones 

on risky assignments. Currently hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme 

From Our Own Correspondent.

Professor Noam Chomsky has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, 

and has authored over 100 books. In a 2005 poll was voted 

the "world's top public intellectual".

Tam Dalyell, former Member of British Parliament and Father of the House. 

An eminent speaker who throughout his career refused to be prevented 

from speaking the truth to powerful administrations.

 

Christine Grahame MSP, determined advocate of the Lockerbie campaign.

Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye magazine.

Father Pat Keegans, Lockerbie Catholic parish priest at the time of the tragedy. 

 Mr Andrew Killgore, former US Ambassador to Qatar. Founder of Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.

John Pilger, former war correspondent, now a campaigning journalist and film maker. 

Dr Jim Swire.

Sir Teddy Taylor, British Conservative Party politician, MP from 1964 to 1979. 

Desmond Tutu, former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa. 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr Terry Waite. Former envoy for the church of England, held captive from 1987 to 1991

THE FULL LIST OF SIGNATORIES

Ms Kate Adie (Former Chief News Correspondent for BBC News).

Mr John Ashton (Author of ‘Megrahi: You are my Jury’ and co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Mr David Benson (Actor/author of the play ‘Lockerbie: Unfinished Business’).

Mrs Jean Berkley (Mother of Alistair Berkley: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Peter Biddulph (Lockerbie tragedy researcher).

Mr Benedict Birnberg (Retired senior partner of Birnberg Peirce & Partners).

Professor Robert Black QC (‘Architect’ of the Kamp van Zeist Trial).

Mr Paul Bull (Close friend of Bill Cadman: killed on Pan Am 103).

Professor Noam Chomsky (Human rights, social and political commentator).

Mr Tam Dalyell (UK MP: 1962-2005. Father of the House: 2001-2005).

Mr Ian Ferguson (Co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Dr David Fieldhouse (Police surgeon present at the Pan Am 103 crash site).

Mr Robert Forrester (Secretary of Justice for Megrahi).

Ms Christine Grahame MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament).

Mr Ian Hamilton QC (Advocate, author and former university rector).

Mr Ian Hislop (Editor of ‘Private Eye’).

Fr Pat Keegans (Lockerbie parish priest on 21^st December 1988).

Ms A L Kennedy (Author).

Dr Morag Kerr (Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi).

Mr Andrew Killgore (Former US Ambassador to Qatar).

Mr Moses Kungu (Lockerbie councillor on the 21^st of December 1988).

Mr Adam Larson (Editor and proprietor of ‘The Lockerbie Divide’).

Mr Aonghas MacNeacail (Poet and journalist).

Mr Eddie McDaid (Lockerbie commentator).

Mr Rik McHarg (Communications hub coordinator: Lockerbie crash sites).

Mr Iain McKie (Retired Superintendent of Police).

Mr Marcello Mega (Journalist covering the Lockerbie incident).

Ms Heather Mills (Reporter for ‘Private Eye’).

Rev’d John F Mosey (Father of Helga Mosey: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Len Murray (Retired solicitor).

Cardinal Keith O’Brien (Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church).

Mr Denis Phipps (Aviation security expert).

Mr John Pilger (Campaigning human rights journalist).

Mr Steven Raeburn (Editor of ‘The Firm’).

Dr Tessa Ransford OBE  (Poetry Practitioner and Adviser).

Mr James Robertson (Author).

Mr Kenneth Roy (Editor of ‘The Scottish Review’).

Dr David Stevenson (Retired medical specialist and Lockerbie commentator).

Dr Jim Swire (Father of Flora Swire: victim of Pan Am 103).

Sir Teddy Taylor (UK MP: 1964-2005. Former Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Winner).

Mr Terry Waite CBE (Former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury and hostage negotiator).

US media on the death of Megrahi

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2012.

The American press on the death of the "Lockerbie bomber"

[This is the heading over an article by Ambassador Andrew I Killgore just published on the website of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.  It reads as follows:]

The Washington Post, New York Times and the US edition of the Financial Times all carried articles on the May 20 death in Tripoli, Libya of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of bombing Pan American Flight 103 on Dec 21, 1988.

The Post, whose pro-Israel sympathies cause its Middle East coverage to be unreliable at best, had a straight one-column article. It expressed no doubts that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 was transported from Valletta, Malta to Frankfurt, Germany to London, where it was loaded onto the doomed plane.

Determined to publish as little as possible on the Lockerbie tragedy, the news of Megrahi's death was published in the Post's little-read obituary section—alongside the death of singer Robin Gibb of the disco group the Bee Gees. In a stunning example of the paper's priorities, the Post devoted nearly twice as much space to Gibb's obituary as it did to Megrahi's.

The Financial Times article is better, and much less linear. "Discrepancies at the trial led many to believe in Megrahi's innocence," it informs its readers. The former Scottish lord advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, in expressing his doubts about Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci's identification of Megrahi as having bought certain clothes from his shop in Valletta, remarked that Gauci was "an apple short of a picnic." The Financial Times also notes that "there were reports that Gauci received at least $2 million from the US, possibly via the CIA."

As a result, the paper concludes, "we may never know who placed the bomb that brought down terror and death to a planeload of passengers, to the crew that served them, and civilians in a sleepy Scottish town [Lockerbie] below."

The New York Times carried two articles on Megrahi's death, one by John F Burns and the other by Robert D McFadden. Neither is bad, given the American media's strange silence on the Lockerbie issue. Burns writes, "Even Megrahi's death may not end the saga of Flight 103."

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the Pan Am 103 crash, is mentioned by name, but Dr Robert Black is not. It was Black, professor emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, who originated the idea of holding the Lockerbie trial in The Netherlands with Scottish judges under Scottish law. Nor is any mention made of the Justice for Megrahi Committee (of which this writer is a member).

Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, noted in a television interview that the Scottish police investigation of the bombing had never been closed, and that Libya's new government had "promised to cooperate" in an effort to settle who was responsible.

Dr Swire, whom Burns describes as "the most persistent — and most controversial — of Megrahi's defenders in Britain," fainted in court when Megrahi was convicted and his indicted co-defendant Lamen Khalifa Fhimah acquitted. Swire is a vigorous advocate of an independent inquiry into the bombing, Burns writes, and was reported to have said in broadcast interviews on May 20 that there were two false pieces of evidence in Megrahi's conviction. According to Swire, shopowner Gauci had been paid "millions of dollars" by Western intelligence agencies. Also, the bomb's circuit board was one used by Iranian — not Libyan — intelligence.

McFadden provides much evidence on doubts about Megrahi's guilt. The Lockerbie court "found the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable," he writes, but nevertheless left "no reasonable doubt" on Megrahi's guilt. He quotes Hans Koechler, a United Nations observer at the trial, as calling it "a spectacular miscarriage of justice." McFadden continues: "Many legal experts and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Megrahi a scapegoat for a Libyan government long identified with terrorism." While denying involvement, he writes, Libya paid $2.7 million to the victims' families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation. 

Taking another look at the destruction of Pan Am 103

[This is the headline over an article by Ambassador Andrew I Killgore that was published on the Voltaire.net website on this date in 2010. The following are excerpts:]

In February 1986 Israeli Mossad operatives installed a “Trojan” communications device on the top floor of an apartment house in Tripoli, Libya. The six-foot-long device was able to receive messages on one frequency and automatically rebroadcast the same message on a different frequency—in this case, one used by the government of Libya.

Israeli naval commandos arriving in miniature submarines in the middle of the night had delivered the Trojan, only seven inches in diameter, to the lone Mossad agent in Tripoli, who drove a rented van to their rendezvous point on a deserted beach outside Tripoli. The agent, along with four of the commandos, then took the Trojan to an apartment building in the Libyan capital where he had rented the top floor, and installed the device. By March the Trojan was broadcasting a series of “terrorist” orders to Libyan embassies around the world.

These messages were picked up by Spain, France and the United States. Thinking it odd that normally cautious Libya suddenly would become so careless, France and Spain took them to be fake. The US, however, accepted the broadcasts as real—especially since Washington was assured by Israel that they were indeed genuine.

The foregoing account is taken from The Other Side of Deception, the second of two books written by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky after he left Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

Less than two months after the Trojan was installed, on April 5, 1986, the La Belle nightclub in then-West Berlin was bombed, killing two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. At the same time a false “success” signal was sent, apparently from the device in Tripoli.

“False-flagged” by Israel, President Ronald Reagan on April 14 sent American bombers from Britain and from US aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean to strike Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 101 people, including the adopted young daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi when his house in Tripoli was bombed.

Operation Trojan was one of Mossad’s “great successes,” Ostrovsky wrote. (...)

As soon as Pan Am Flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec 21, 1988, Mossad could see the opportunity to repeat its earlier success.

The proximity in time between the Lockerbie crash and the shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3 of that year of an Iran Air passenger plane over the Persian Gulf, with the loss of 290 lives, presented a perfect “revenge” scenario. That, clearly, was the initial premise of the investigators at Lockerbie. Dr Robert Black, professor of criminal law at Edinburgh University in Scotland, told this writer that, for the first two years following the Pan Am crash, investigators were focused on Iran as having hired Ahmad Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command to carry out a retaliatory bombing.

In a Jan 28, 2009 article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, however, the late Russell Warren Howe cited the book Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas. Thomas quotes a Mossad source as saying, “Within hours after the [Pan Am 103] crash Mossad’s LAP [psychological warfare or disinformation] staff were working their media contacts, urging them to blame and publicize that ‘Libya-did-it.’” (...)

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the crash, has written: “Coming from a scientific educational background, I found that it was the forensic evidence at [the trial at Camp] Zeist…which first convinced me that the prosecution case was a fabrication.”

Another astonishing factor was that the Crown (the prosecutors) ignored evidence of a break-in of the Pan Am luggage area at Heathrow early in the morning of that fatal December day. (...)

Dr Swire, who has described the Court’s conviction of Megrahi as “a cock and bull story,” is not alone in his skepticism. Hans Köehler, the UN observer at the trial, has described the verdict as “incomprehensible,” and Dr Robert Black has denounced the guilty verdict in equally dismissive language.

Thus the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 remains a mystery. If two years of investigating Iran produced no evidence, and the evidence used to convict Megrahi was fake, who was responsible for the horrific crime?

RIP Ambassador Andrew I Killgore

I am saddened to learn of the death on 20 December 2016 of Ambassador Andrew I Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and a longtime seeker after Lockerbie truth. Links to his many writings on the Lockerbie case can be found here. In an email to Dr Jim Swire, Robert Forrester and me, the managing editor of WRMEA, Janet McMahon, wrote:

“I'm sorry to have to tell you the sad news that Andy Killgore died yesterday. He had gotten increasingly frail over the last year or so, and was developing a second round of pneumonia after a fall last Wednesday and did not want to go to a hospital. We visited him Friday afternoon, and he was alert, comfortable and in good spirits. We had planned to visit him again yesterday, but his daughters called us to say he had died. It is definitely a shock, but we are grateful that he did not suffer or have to endure a long painful death. His beloved family was with him.

“As you know, he was very passionate about Lockerbie. I printed out all your communications to him and he read them avidly. He had his own idea about who was responsible, of course, but certainly agreed that there has been a most grievous cover-up. We often talked about going to London or Edinburgh if there were any major development. He felt close to you all, and was glad to have you as comrades-in-arms!”

In his reply Dr Swire wrote:

“The truth is that after 28 years all of us who like Andrew still feel passionately about the deception laid upon this tragedy are ageing now and others also among us have died.

“In their memory as well as for the memory of all those who died at Lockerbie, we cannot let the matter rest, and lately I have come to believe that within the next couple of years the truth will burst out.

“When it does that will be a good time to remember people like Andrew who gave so much sincerity to the search.”

WRMEA’s obituary of Ambassador Killgore can be read here.

There is some deep secret hidden in this tragedy

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

Convicted Lockerbie bomber probably not guilty—so who is the real criminal?

[This is the headline over an article in the current issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs by the magazine's publisher, Ambassador Andrew I Killgore. The following are excerpts.]

On Aug 21 Scotland freed Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi—convicted under Scottish law at a special court in The Netherlands of destroying Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on [December] 21, 1988. Killed were 259 persons, including 189 Americans on board and 11 people on the ground. The terminally ill Megrahi, after dropping his second appeal, was released on compassionate grounds. Back in Libya, he continues to protest his innocence. (...)

At the Lockerbie trial so-called “key witness” [Tony] Gauci would identify Megrahi as the purchaser of certain items of clothing found at the crash site that Gauci claimed were purchased at his shop in Valetta, Malta. But on the witness stand Gauci proved to be a flop at identification. An FBI officer, Harold Hendershot, called to the witness stand to bolster Gauci’s testimony, also appeared to lack credibility.

Another puzzling aspect of the Lockerbie trial was that, despite the prosecution’s insistence that the bombing could only have been a two-man job, Megrahi’s co-defendant, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. No explanation was ever forthcoming. A middle-aged American (judging by his accent) attending the trial was overheard by this writer on a BBC broadcast expressing uncertainty about the testimony: “I wonder who killed our relatives?”

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the crash, is sure that Gauci identified the wrong man. Swire is an unusual man. As an officer in the British army, he was trained in the use of plastic explosives. After completing his army national service, he worked for the BBC as an electronics engineer before studying medicine and becoming a practicing physician. Dr Swire cannot accept as credible the Lockerbie trial’s technical details about the explosives that brought down Pan Am 103. He became a spokesman for relatives of British nationals killed in the crash. Overwhelmingly these relatives do not believe that Megrahi is guilty.

Dr Swire is convinced that shopkeeper Gauci identified an innocent man as the bomber. In a Dec 27, 2007 e-mail from Swire to this writer, Swire quoted Gauci as saying that Megrahi was “like” the man who bought clothes in his shop, but that the age and height were “very different.” Nevertheless, the Scottish judges accepted Gauci’s testimony.

Gauci reportedly now lives in Australia with a $2 million (some reports say $4 million) reward from the American government. According to the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” Web site, since its inception in 1984 the program has paid $77 million to more than 50 people.

But the biggest reason for questioning the validity of the “Libya-did-it” scenario is the sheer improbability of placing a bomb on a plane in Valetta, Malta, bound for Frankfurt, Germany, there to be offloaded on a second plane bound for London, where it would be offloaded on a third plane bound for New York, to explode 38 minutes later. Common sense would dictate a far more simple scheme: load the bomb aboard a plane in London with a simple pressure mechanism to go off when the plane was safely out to sea (...)

In the aforementioned e-mail, from which I am free to quote, Dr Swire said the Lockerbie court heard of a “specialized timer/baroceptor bomb mechanism” made by the PFLP-GC in the Damascus suburbs. This device would explode within 30 to 45 minutes after takeoff, but was stable indefinitely at ground level. The court heard that these devices could not be altered. “Yet the court believed,” Swire wrote, “that Megrahi ‘happened’ to set his Swiss timer in such a way that it went off in the middle of the time window for the Syrian device, surviving changes of planes at Frankfurt and London.”

Dr Swire told the BBC News of Aug 20, 2009 that the prosecution at the Lockerbie trial failed to take into consideration the reported break-in of the Pan Am baggage area at Heathrow in the early morning hours of the day of Pan Am 103’s doomed flight.

Many of the British relatives of Pan Am 103 victims have come to believe that the bomb was loaded in London, and thus that Megrahi could not be guilty. These relatives and Dr Swire were opposed to Megrahi’s withdrawing his second appeal on the grounds that further evidence would come out that might have pointed to the real culprit.

In a Jan 4, 2008 e-mail, Dr Swire warned that “ which evokes virulent responses...when questions are raised.”

In an Aug 20, 2009 e-mail response to this writer’s inquiry, Dr Swire said “that it appears that the Iranians used the PFLP-GC as mercenaries in this ghastly business.” According to this theory, held by many who doubt Megrahi’s guilt, including CounterPunch’s Alexander Cockburn, Iran hired the PFLP-GC to avenge the July 3, 1988 shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian Airbus passenger plane, killing 290 passengers, including 66 children. The US ship’s officers later received medals for heroism in combat.

Having lost his daughter in the Pan Am crash, and as an expert in explosives, Dr Swire is uniquely qualified to examine the Pan Am tragedy. America and its mainstream media did not reflect credit on themselves by refusing to acknowledge questions about Megrahi’s guilt.

Dr Swire may well be right in blaming the PFLP-GC for the tragedy. But this writer still has his doubts — because the ineptness of the trial and Washington’s fanaticism in pushing such a flimsy case against Libya leave an impression that it must be covering up for the real criminals. Somehow it seems unlikely that the US would go to such lengths to protect Iran, much less the PFLP-GC.

“It appears that Megrahi is innocent”

[What follows is excerpted from an article by retired US Ambassador Andrew Killgore that was published on Media Monitors Network on this date in 2007:]

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled on June 28 that there may have been a miscarriage of justice in the conviction of Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basit Ali Megrahi for the Dec 21, 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 people on the plane, including 179 Americans, were killed, and 11 people on the ground lost their lives. Megrahi was found guilty on Jan 31, 2001 -- on the shakiest of grounds, in this writer’s opinion -- by three Scottish judges sitting at a special Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. (...)

Dr Robert Black, professor of law at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and originator of the idea to try the Lockerbie defendants in the Netherlands under Scottish law, told this writer in December 2000 that for nearly three years after the crash of Pan Am 103, the investigation looking for a culprit focused on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Their supposition was that Iran may have commissioned the PFLP-CG to down the American plane in retaliation for the accidental shooting down over the Persian Gulf of a civilian Iranian airliner by the American Navy cruiser the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988. Suddenly, however, according to Black, the investigation began to center on Libya.

The premise of the prosecution’s case at the Camp Zeist trial was that the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was loaded at Valetta, Malta on an Air Malta flight bound for Frankfurt, Germany, where it was offloaded onto a feeder flight to London, then loaded aboard Pan Am 103 in London, bound for New York. Megrahi supposedly was assisted by Libyan Airlines employee Lamin Khalifa Fahima in sneaking the bomb aboard the plane in Malta, according to the prosecutors. Although Megrahi and Fahima had been indicted together, Fahima, strangely, was acquitted.

The most compelling evidence to undermine the conviction of Megrahi is the questionable testimony of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who on Dec 7, 1988 supposedly sold Megrahi clothing which was found at the wreckage site of Pan Am 103. Lengthy investigations suggest that while Megrahi was in Malta on Dec 7, he did not buy clothing at Gauci’s shop on that date.

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the Pan Am crash, has always believed that the bomb that destroyed the plane was loaded aboard the plane in London, not at Valetta. An explosives expert in the British Army who resigned his commission to study medicine, Swire became a spokesman for the British relatives of Lockerbie victims. The Glasgow Herald of June 20 contains a sinisterly intriguing quote by Swire, claiming that a US official involved in the case once told him, “Your government and ours know exactly what happened, but we are never going to tell.” [RB: The statement was made to Martin Cadman, not Jim Swire.]

A sensational article in the June 24, 2007 edition of The Scotsman includes allegations by the unnamed “Golfer” -- a Scottish police officer who worked at a senior level on the Lockerbie case -- in which “Golfer” claims there was a plot to blame Libya for the crash of Pan Am 103. In a damning indictment of Scottish justice, he claims that senior members of the Scottish investigating team agreed to manufacture and manipulate evidence to help secure a suspect and conviction. “Golfer” claims that when the Maltese shopkeeper Gauci was shown photographes of both the accused, Megrahi and Fahima, he had failed to identify either of them.

“Golfer” further alleges that a detective changed the labeling on a bag from “cloth charred” to “cloth with debris.” The bag with the changed label contained a piece of a shirt collar and fragments of material said to have been extracted from it, including tiny pieces of circuit board identified as coming from a timer made by a Swiss firm, MEBO. “Golfer” says the detective who knew he would be questioned about the label change was so nervous about it that he had trouble sleeping the night before he testified. “Golfer” claimed that the detective told him he had not been responsible for changing the label on the bag.

The identity of “Golfer” is a closely guarded secret. He will be seen as having betrayed his former colleagues. But his testimony, if it proves true, could be crucial in providing the relatives of the victims with the truth they have been craving for almost 19 years.

Dr Black told this writer in a July 5 telephone conversation that the High Court will probably consider Megrahi’s appeal next year. Black believes that he will be freed.

From all the evidence considered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, it appears that Megrahi is innocent. But if Iran and Libya didn’t do it, who did destroy Pan Am Flight 103?

[RB: Regrettably, the article places a great deal of stress on the revelations by "the golfer" about evidence fabrication which, of course, were dismissed by the SCCRC.]