Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Thurman. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Thurman. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday 13 September 2017

Thurman and the FBI laboratory

[On this date in 1995 the FBI crime laboratory was the subject of a highly critical television programme broadcast on the ABC network. It followed disclosures by one of the laboratory’s scientists, Dr Frederic Whitehurst, about the methods adopted by some of his colleagues, including Tom Thurman. The scandal later became the subject of a book, Tainting Evidence, by John Kelly and Phillip Wearne. The relevance of this to the Lockerbie case becomes apparent in this extract from a 2008 article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer:]

Thomas Thurman worked for the FBI forensics laboratory in the late 80s and most of the 90s. Thurman has been publicly credited for identifying a tiny fragment as part of a MST-13 timer produced by the Swiss company Mebo.

“When that identification was made, of the timer, I knew that we had it,” Thurman told ABC in 1991. “Absolute, positively euphoria! I was on cloud nine.”

Again, his record is far from pristine. The US attorney general [RB: through the Department of Justice’s Inspector General] has accused him of having altered lab reports in a way that rendered subsequent prosecutions all but impossible. He has been transferred out the FBI forensic laboratory. Thurman has since left the FBI and joined the faculty at the School of Criminal Justice, Eastern Kentucky University.
The story sheds some light on his formation. The [Inspector General’s] report says “Williams and Thurman merit special censure for their work. It recommends that Thurman, who has a degree in political science, be reassigned outside the lab and that only scientists work in its explosives section.”
“For what it’s worth the best information on Lockerbie came long after Zeist, when the investigation was closed. I’ve always been curious about this case and never stopped looking into it, until the day I left the CIA in December 1997,” Robert Baer told me.
“The appeals commission posed the question to me about someone planting or manipulating evidence only to cover all the bases. I told them I did not think there was an organized attempt to misdirect the investigation, although I was aware that once it was decided to go after Libya, leads on Iran and the PFLP-GC were dismissed. Often in many investigations of this sort, the best intelligence comes out long after the event,” Baer added.
“I’m fascinated to know precisely why the Scots referred the case back to the court, although they did tell me the FBI and Scotland Yard have manipulated the evidence for the prosecution,” Baer told me.
Forensic analysis of the circuit board fragment allowed the investigators to identify its origin. The timer, known as MST-13, is fabricated by a Swiss Company named MeBo, which stands for Meister and Bollier.
The company has indeed sold about 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military (machine-made nine-ply green boards), as well as a few units (hand-made eight-ply brown boards) to a Research Institute in Bernau, known to act as a front to the Stasi, the former East German secret police. (...)
The CIA’s Vincent Cannistraro is on the record stating that no one has ever questioned the Thurman credentials. Allow me.
“He’s very aggressive, but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of FBI management,” says Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who filed the complaints that led to the inspector general’s report.
“We’re not necessarily going to get the truth out of what we’re doing here,” concluded Whitehurst who now works as an attorney at law and forensic consultant.
Dr Whitehurst has authored something like 257 memos to the FBI and Justice Department with various complaints of incompetence, “fabrication of evidence” and perjury of various examiners in the FBI Laboratory (primarily Explosives Unit examiners).
“What I had to say about Tom Thurman and the computer chip was reported to the US attorney general’s inspector general during the investigation of wrongdoing in the FBI lab in the 1990s. I acquired all that information and the inspector general’s report from a law suit under the Freedom of Information Act and therefore the information provided under that FOIA request is in the public sector,” Whitehurst told me.
“I reported to my superiors up to and including the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US attorney general, members of the US Congress and US Senate as well as the Office of the President of the United States that FBI Supervisory Special Agent Thomas Thurman altered my reports for five years without my authorization or knowledge. This is public information. Thurman holds an undergraduate degree in political science and I hold a PhD in chemistry.”
“Thurman was not recognized by the FBI or anyone else as having expertise in complex chemical analysis and I was. When confronted with this information Thurman did not deny it but argued that my reports could and/or would hurt prosecutors’ cases. I was very concerned about the fact that wrong information in the final reports could hurt individuals and deny citizens of this country right to a fair trial. When I raised my concerns with my managers at the FBI laboratory, all except for one of them reminded me that Thurman was the “hero” behind determining the perpetrators of the Pan Am 103 disaster.”
“I understood from that that the FBI would not expose these issues for fear that the investigation into the Pan Am 103 bombing would be seen as possibly flawed and this would open the FBI up to criticism and outside review.”
No government body has found that Mr. Thurman has done anything illegal. However he was relieved from his post in the FBI’s Explosives Unit and placed in charge of the FBI’s Bomb Data Center.
“Did Mr Thurman find the integrated circuit chip about which you have referred? After leaving the FBI, I was interviewed by Scottish defense attorneys for one of the individuals accused of bombing Pan Am 103. At that interview were two of my attorneys, two FBI attorneys and two Scottish attorneys and me. I was asked what I knew about the circuit chip. I can say that I was not interviewed because I agreed with the official version of the discovery of that integrated circuit chip,” Whitehurst wrote to me. (...)
In the world of Forensic Sciences, former FBI [special agent] William Tobin is a legend. To name but a few of his achievements, Tobin demonstrated, along with his NTSB colleagues, that TWA 800 had been destroyed by mechanical failure at the time when virtually the rest of the world strongly believed a terror act. Both the NTSB and the CIA subsequently presented compelling evidence demonstrating the scientific validity of Tobin’s conclusion.
After retiring, Tobin demonstrated that the Lead content bullet identification technique, used by the FBI for more than four decades, was flawed. Tobin was not allowed to work on this matter while at the FBI.
Tobin knows a few things about superhero Thomas Thurman. Tobin told me that, in his opinion, Thurman and other Explosives Unit examiners were prone to confirmation bias, an observer bias whereby an examiner is inclined to see what he is expected to see. Tobin’s opinion is based on “numerous interactions whereby Thurman and other examiners rendered conclusions supporting the prevailing investigative or prosecutorial theory but which were unsupported by scientific fact.
It was not uncommon to determine that items characterized as ‘chrome-plated’ were nickel-plated, ‘extrusions’ turned out to be drawn products, ‘castings’ turned out to be forgings, white residues characterized as explosive residue turned out to be corrosion products (generally Al2O3 or a non-stoichiometric form), bent nails claimed to be indicative of an explosion, and a truck axle was characterized as having fractured from an explosion (a conclusion rendered solely from an 8-1/2” x 11” photograph where the axle was a small fraction of the field of view and the fracture surface itself was not observable).
“I put no credence into any scientific or technical conclusions rendered by anyone without a suitable scientific background for that matter, until I can make an independent evaluation. Thurman was a history or political science major to my recollection,” Tobin added
“His habit, as with most Explosives Unit examiners with whom I interacted and based on numerous court transcript reviews and ‘bailout’ requests I received on several occasions (to ‘bail out’ an examiner who not only misrepresented an item of evidence but also was confronted with more accurate representations of the evidence in trial), was to seek someone else’s expertise and then present it as his own in a courtroom without attribution.”
“He would frequently come into my office, ask for a ‘quick’ assessment of something (but I would always indicate that my opinion was only a preliminary evaluation and that I would need to conduct proper scientific testing of the item(s)), then weeks later I would see the assessment in a formal FBI Laboratory report to the contributor (of the evidence) as his own ‘scientific’ conclusion,” Tobin remembers.
“I cannot imagine that he was acting alone. He was a mid-level manager without a great deal of authority and with severely limited credentials of which the FBI was fully aware,” Whitehurst answered when I asked him if he thought that Thurman had acted alone.
“The problem with having a scientific laboratory within an intelligence gathering organization is that scientists traditionally are seeking truth and at times their data is in direct contradiction to the wishes of a government that is not seeking truth but victory on battle fields.”
“The problem with the scientific data is that when one wishes to really determine what the government scientists or pseudo scientists could have known, one need only look at the data. So few citizens ever ask for or review that data. So few scientists wish to question the government that feeds them and gives security to their families.”
“Was Thurman ordered to do what he did? No one acts alone without orders in the FBI. We had clear goals which were clearly given to us in every document we received from anyone. If a police organization wished for us to provide them “proof” of guilt then they told us in many ways of their absolute belief that the perpetrators were those individuals they had already arrested. If the president of the United States tells the country in the national news that Dandeny Munoz Mosquera is one of the most fear assassins in the history of the world then every agent knows that he must provide information to support that statement. If leaders decide without concern for foundation of truth then most people will follow them,” Whitehurst said.
“Thurman did not act alone. The culture at the FBI was one of group think, don’t go against the flow, stay in line, ignore that data that does not fit the group think,” Whitehurst added.
His former colleague agrees. “I’ve seen so often where an individual who was at one time an independent thinker and had good powers of reasoning acquires the ‘us vs them,’ circle-the-wagons, public-relations at all costs mentality at the FBI,” Tobin says.
“As much as I loved the institution, I have never seen a worse case of spin-doctoring of any image-tarnishing facts or developments as I had at the FBI. Never! It seemed the guiding principle was ‘image before reality’ or ‘image before all else’ (including fact). Whatever you do, ‘don’t embarrass the Bureau’ and ‘the Bureau can do no wrong.’”

Monday 31 October 2016

FBI Special Agent Thomas Thurman

A whole day power outage here in the Roggeveld Karoo made it impossible to post to this blog yesterday (30 October). Here is what I had intended to post:

[This is the heading over an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer that appeared on the Canada Free Press website on this date in 2008. It reads in part:]

“No court is likely get to the truth [regarding the bombing of Pan Am 103], now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence.” - Oliver Miles, Former British Ambassador to Libya
Thomas Thurman worked for the FBI forensics laboratory in the late 80s and most of the 90s. Thurman has been publicly credited for identifying a tiny fragment as part of a MST-13 timer produced by the Swiss company Mebo.

“When that identification was made, of the timer, I knew that we had it,” Thurman told ABC in 1991. “Absolute, positively euphoria! I was on cloud nine.”
Again, his record is far from pristine. The US attorney general has accused him of having altered lab reports in a way that rendered subsequent prosecutions all but impossible. He has been transferred out the FBI forensic laboratory. Thurman has since left the FBI and joined the faculty at the School of Criminal Justice, Eastern Kentucky University.
The story shed some light on his formation. The report says “Williams and Thurman merit special censure for their work. It recommends that Thurman, who has a degree in political science, be reassigned outside the lab and that only scientists work in its explosives section.”
“For what it’s worth the best information on Lockerbie came long after Zeist, when the investigation was closed. I’ve always been curious about this case and never stopped looking into it, until the day I left the CIA in December 1997,” Robert Baer told me.
“The appeals commission posed the question to me about someone planting or manipulating evidence only to cover all the bases. I told them I did not think there was an organized attempt to misdirect the investigation, although I was aware that once it was decided to go after Libya, leads on Iran and the PFLP-GC were dismissed. Often in many investigations of this sort, the best intelligence comes out long after the event,” Baer added.
“I’m fascinated to know precisely why the Scots referred the case back to the court, although they did tell me the FBI and Scotland Yard have manipulated the evidence for the prosecution,” Baer told me.
Forensic analysis of the circuit board fragment allowed the investigators to identify its origin. The timer, known as MST-13, is fabricated by a Swiss Company named MeBo, which stands for Meister and Bollier.
The company has indeed sold about 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military (machine-made nine-ply green boards), as well as a few units (hand-made eight-ply brown boards) to a Research Institute in Bernau, known to act as a front to the Stasi, the former East German secret police. (...)
The CIA’s Vincent Cannistraro is on the record stating that no one has ever questioned the Thurman credentials. Allow me.
“He’s very aggressive, but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of FBI management,” says Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who filed the complaints that led to the inspector general’s report.
“We’re not necessarily going to get the truth out of what we’re doing here,” concluded Whitehurst who now works as an attorney at law and forensic consultant.
Dr Whitehurst has authored something like 257 memos to the FBI and Justice Department with various complaints of incompetence, “fabrication of evidence” and perjury of various examiners in the FBI Laboratory (primarily Explosives Unit examiners).
“What I had to say about Tom Thurman and the computer chip was reported to the US attorney general’s inspector general during the investigation of wrongdoing in the FBI lab in the 1990s. I acquired all that information and the inspector general’s report from a law suit under the Freedom of Information Act and therefore the information provided under that FOIA request is in the public sector,” Whitehurst told me.
“I reported to my superiors up to and including the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US attorney general, members of the US Congress and US Senate as well as the Office of the President of the United States that FBI Supervisory Special Agent Thomas Thurman altered my reports for five years without my authorization or knowledge. This is public information. Thurman holds an undergraduate degree in political science and I hold a PhD in chemistry.”
“Thurman was not recognized by the FBI or anyone else as having expertise in complex chemical analysis and I was. When confronted with this information Thurman did not deny it but argued that my reports could and/or would hurt prosecutors’ cases. I was very concerned about the fact that wrong information in the final reports could hurt individuals and deny citizens of this country right to a fair trial. When I raised my concerns with my managers at the FBI laboratory, all except for one of them reminded me that Thurman was the “hero” behind determining the perpetrators of the Pan Am 103 disaster.”
“I understood from that that the FBI would not expose these issues for fear that the investigation into the Pan Am 103 bombing would be seen as possibly flawed and this would open the FBI up to criticism and outside review.”
No government body has found that Mr. Thurman has done anything illegal. However he was relieved from his post in the FBI’s Explosives Unit and placed in charge of the FBI’s Bomb Data Center.
“Did Mr Thurman find the integrated circuit chip about which you have referred? After leaving the FBI, I was interviewed by Scottish defense attorneys for one of the individuals accused of bombing Pan Am 103. At that interview were two of my attorneys, two FBI attorneys and two Scottish attorneys and me. I was asked what I knew about the circuit chip. I can say that I was not interviewed because I agreed with the official version of the discovery of that integrated circuit chip,” Whitehurst wrote to me. (...)
In the world of Forensic Sciences, former FBI [special agent] William Tobin is a legend. To name but a few of his achievements, Tobin demonstrated, along with his NTSB colleagues, that TWA 800 had been destroyed by mechanical failure at the time when virtually the rest of the world strongly believed a terror act. Both the NTSB and the CIA subsequently presented compelling evidence demonstrating the scientific validity of Tobin’s conclusion.
After retiring, Tobin demonstrated that the Lead content bullet identification technique, used by the FBI for more than four decades, was flawed. Tobin was not allowed to work on this matter while at the FBI.
Tobin knows a few things about superhero Thomas Thurman. Tobin told me that, in his opinion, Thurman and other Explosives Unit examiners were prone to confirmation bias, an observer bias whereby an examiner is inclined to see what he is expected to see. Tobin’s opinion is based on “numerous interactions whereby Thurman and other examiners rendered conclusions supporting the prevailing investigative or prosecutorial theory but which were unsupported by scientific fact.
It was not uncommon to determine that items characterized as ‘chrome-plated’ were nickel-plated, ‘extrusions’ turned out to be drawn products, ‘castings’ turned out to be forgings, white residues characterized as explosive residue turned out to be corrosion products (generally Al2O3 or a non-stoichiometric form), bent nails claimed to be indicative of an explosion, and a truck axle was characterized as having fractured from an explosion (a conclusion rendered solely from an 8-1/2” x 11” photograph where the axle was a small fraction of the field of view and the fracture surface itself was not observable).
“I put no credence into any scientific or technical conclusions rendered by anyone without a suitable scientific background for that matter, until I can make an independent evaluation. Thurman was a history or political science major to my recollection,” Tobin added
“His habit, as with most Explosives Unit examiners with whom I interacted and based on numerous court transcript reviews and ‘bailout’ requests I received on several occasions (to ‘bail out’ an examiner who not only misrepresented an item of evidence but also was confronted with more accurate representations of the evidence in trial), was to seek someone else’s expertise and then present it as his own in a courtroom without attribution.”
“He would frequently come into my office, ask for a ‘quick’ assessment of something (but I would always indicate that my opinion was only a preliminary evaluation and that I would need to conduct proper scientific testing of the item(s)), then weeks later I would see the assessment in a formal FBI Laboratory report to the contributor (of the evidence) as his own ‘scientific’ conclusion,” Tobin remembers.
“I cannot imagine that he was acting alone. He was a mid-level manager without a great deal of authority and with severely limited credentials of which the FBI was fully aware,” Whitehurst answered when I asked him if he thought that Thurman had acted alone.
“The problem with having a scientific laboratory within an intelligence gathering organization is that scientists traditionally are seeking truth and at times their data is in direct contradiction to the wishes of a government that is not seeking truth but victory on battle fields.”
“The problem with the scientific data is that when one wishes to really determine what the government scientists or pseudo scientists could have known, one need only look at the data. So few citizens ever ask for or review that data. So few scientists wish to question the government that feeds them and gives security to their families.”
“Was Thurman ordered to do what he did? No one acts alone without orders in the FBI. We had clear goals which were clearly given to us in every document we received from anyone. If a police organization wished for us to provide them “proof” of guilt then they told us in many ways of their absolute belief that the perpetrators were those individuals they had already arrested. If the president of the United States tells the country in the national news that Dandeny Munoz Mosquera is one of the most fear assassins in the history of the world then every agent knows that he must provide information to support that statement. If leaders decide without concern for foundation of truth then most people will follow them,” Whitehurst said.
“Thurman did not act alone. The culture at the FBI was one of group think, don’t go against the flow, stay in line, ignore that data that does not fit the group think,” Whitehurst added.
His former colleague agrees. “I’ve seen so often where an individual who was at one time an independent thinker and had good powers of reasoning acquires the ‘us vs them,’ circle-the-wagons, public-relations at all costs mentality at the FBI,” Tobin says.
“As much as I loved the institution, I have never seen a worse case of spin-doctoring of any image-tarnishing facts or developments as I had at the FBI. Never! It seemed the guiding principle was ‘image before reality’ or ‘image before all else’ (including fact). Whatever you do, ‘don’t embarrass the Bureau’ and ‘the Bureau can do no wrong.’”

Monday 15 June 2015

Tom Thurman "identifies" the dodgy timer fragment

[It was on this date twenty-five years ago that the FBI’s James ‘Tom’ Thurman, so he says, identified the fragment of circuit board PT/35b as coming from a MST-13 timer manufactured by the Swiss company MEBO. The circumstances are narrated in chapter 4 of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, especially at pages 62 to 66. The account that follows is taken from a long article entitled Thurman’s Photo Quest on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide:]

What we have in Thurman's case, with or without the actual piece of evidence, was the crucial identification. And one point that's consistent throughout is that he held a photo only when he found the match. The question at hand is how long it took him to find it and to determine its meaning vis-a-vis who carried out the bombing.

Tom Gets a Green Light
On the 10th of January 1990 new Senior Investigating Officer Stuart Henderson (who replaced John Orr) presented at a meeting of investigators in the UK. He did not openly mention the circuit board fragment PT/35(b), an amazing find UK investigators had been puzzling over for four months. But off to the side, he told FBI chief investigator Richard Marquise about it, Marquise says in his 2006 book SCOTBOM.  [p58] He expressed interest in helping find a match, but Henderson insisted on going it alone. “This decision cost us six months,” writes Marquise.

It was at a later conference in Virginia, on 11 June, when Marquise relates how the Scots finally made their puzzlement known to all, having blindly checked 55 companies to no avail. Given the opening, special Agent Thurman “approached Henderson and asked if he could take photographs of PT-35 and attempt to identify it. Henderson, who believed the Scots had done all they could do, agreed.” [p60] This passage is (...) rather ambiguous. It seems to read that Thurman, in Arlington, was allowed to snap a pic of evidence SIO Henderson had there with him. Then perhaps it means he took some of the prints they had brought.

Either way, he walked away with a picture or pictures of this crucial and curious evidence, a half-inch square, perfectly readable, mammoth of implausibility. The "forensic explosives expert" didn't balk at it, just ran with it. Or crawled, as he suggests.

"Months, Literally" or 2-4 Days?
A 1991 Miami Herald article, based on interview with Thurman, reported that he had “meticulously compared the picture of the fragment to hundreds of other devices,” a lengthy-sounding process. Affirming this, Thurman himself told the adoring program Air Crash Investigation in 2008:
“I spent, uh, months, literally, looking through all about the files of the FBI on other examinations that we had, uh, conducted over many many many years. […] After a period I just ran out of leads. And at that point I said, okay now we need to go outside the physical FBI laboratory.”
And it was there, in a CIA facility, that he found the long-sought answer.

But Marquise said “what Thurman did yielded fruit within two days.[…] Henderson and his colleagues were on an airplane headed back to Scotland” when Thurman set to work. They had barely settled back in at home before his efforts “would turn Henderson around quicker than he ever imagined,” putting him back stateside, along with electronics fiend Alan Feraday, within 24 hours of the discovery. [p60]

Further evidence against Thurman’s "months" claim is his own well-memorized “day that I made the identification,” recalling it as one would a wedding anniversary: June 15 1990. He had four days tops to get this grueling season of cross-checking out of the way after the 11 June conference (perhaps a multi-day event) where Marquise has him first learning of the thing.

Who He Ran To
What Thurman did, Marquise sums up, is know where to look. He took the photo to a CIA explosives and timers expert code-named John Scott Orkin (real name unknown - he testified under this name at Camp Zeist). [p60] Thurman mentions him only as an unnamed "contact" in the 2008 ACI interview.  From the vast photo files on hand, "Orkin" helped locate an obvious fit with the blow-up of PT/35(b). If you were Tom Thurman and knew about John Orkin, would you waste even one afternoon scrounging in the FBI's files, or go right to him?

Nothing I've seen specifies this match-up was achieved in only one visit on a single day, but that makes the most sense, as does starting right there. That would give us no more than "hours, literally" to describe the search duration. And either way we're at the point of days at most.

The matching circuit board was found in a timer confiscated in the African nation Togo in 1986. This device, assembled in a small plastic case, was physically available for Thurman to look at. He was given permission to take it apart and examine the main board inside. Upon confirming again the obvious similarities, “within a few minutes, literally, I started getting cold chills,” he told Air Crash Investigation.  He's also described as declaring "I have you now!" [p60] and other variations. In a 2010 interview, he said "I could not believe it under any circumstances, and it was there."

That he got these chills only after getting access to the CIA’s special stores is noteworthy, and the Agency is right to claim much of the credit, as they have in places. An AFIO newsletter from just after the Zeist verdict purred that “the CIA’s most important contribution in helping secure the conviction” was “when a CIA engineer was able to identify the timer […] shifting the focus of the probe from a Palestinian terrorist group to Libya.”  (This report's oblique reference to the CIA's less brilliant offering, Giaka, is also worth a read.)

As the overall story tells it, this was clearly a collaborative CIA-FBI effort, via Thurman and "Orkin", that neither side can claim sole credit for. And without this coming together, we're to infer, the naming of this planted piece of Libyan black magic would be delayed or impossible for both Scottish and American investigators. The power of cooperation, between intelligence and law enforcement, and across the Atlantic - a running theme of the 103 investigation - is nicely illustrated here.

[Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer is currently engaged on his PT35B blog in a meticulous exploration of all the evidence about the identification of this fragment.]

Sunday 5 March 2017

Differentiating between personal opinions and scientific fact

[On this date in 1997 Tam Dalyell MP asked a question in the House of Commons arising out of the soon-to-be-published US Department of Justice Inspector-General’s report The FBI Laboratory: An Investigation into Laboratory Practices and Alleged Misconduct in Explosives-Related and Other Cases. An FBI internal memo subsequent to that report contained the following:

"It is clear that SSA Thurman does not understand the scientific issues involved with the interpretation and significance of explosives and explosives residue composition. He therefore should realise this deficiency and differentiate between his personal opinions and scientific fact. An expert's opinion should be based upon objective, scientific findings and be separated from personal predilections and biases. (...) SSA Thurman acted irresponsibly. He should be held accountable. He should be disciplined accordingly".

The exchange in the House of Commons reads as follows:]

HC Deb 05 March 1997 vol 291 cc883-4
Mr. Dalyell To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, pursuant to the letter of the Lord Advocate to the hon Member for Linlithgow of 14 February, by whom the allegations were considered and the conclusions drawn that proof of the Scottish case against the two accused Libyans did not depend on evidence that Mr Thurman might give.
The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord James Douglas-Hamilton) The allegations concerning Mr Thurman are a matter for the United States authorities. I am advised that the United States inspector general's report, after investigation of the allegations, has not yet been published. When the American allegations became known, Mr Thurman's role in the Lockerbie case was considered by the then Lord Advocate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry. As long ago as October 1995, he advised the hon. Gentleman that proof of the Lockerbie case does not depend on evidence that Mr Thurman might give.
Mr. Dalyell Now we know that the Crown Office has slavishly followed information from the United States. At the time, did the Americans know that Mr Thurman would be accused and lose his job for having fabricated forensic evidence? If it was not Mr Thurman, who was it?
Lord James Douglas-Hamilton Obviously, the Law Officers are well aware of the allegations. However, the report has not been published, and it would be wrong to prejudge its outcome. I repeat what I have already said: the Lord Advocate has never suggested that Mr Thurman did not play a significant part in the investigation. The Lord Advocate and his predecessor have chosen their words carefully in saying that the case does not depend on evidence that Mr Thurman might give.
Sir Hector Monro Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that those who live in Lockerbie or, like me, near it firmly believe that the investigations conducted by the Dumfries and Galloway police, the procurator fiscal and the Lord Advocate show that the alleged criminals in Libya must be brought to book in a court in Scotland or the United States, and that diversions to other possible suspects only cause harm?
Lord James Douglas-Hamilton I agree with my right hon Friend. I was at Lockerbie literally within hours of the tragedy and atrocity. I believe that the Law Officers would not have brought forward the accusations if they had not been based on very strong evidence.
Dr Godman Despite the excellent work done by the police force mentioned by the right hon. Member for Dumfries (Sir H Monro) and the Prime Minister's acknowledgement to me, some months ago, that any such trial will be held in Scotland and not in America, when will the Minister admit that it is highly unlikely that any such trial will take place at the High Court in Edinburgh? Almost nine years have passed since the terrible affair at Lockerbie, yet we are no nearer to bringing the culprits to trial. Why have the Government failed so signally in the matter?
Lord James Douglas-Hamilton Those issues could well be addressed to the Libyan Government. The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Barnes (Mr. Hanley), made it clear at the Dispatch Box last Friday that we should look to the Libyan Government to assist with the investigation. He went on to say: Libya's record of state sponsorship of terrorism is, rightly, a matter of deep and abiding concern."—[Official Report, 28 February 1997; Vol 291, c 603.] I reject arguments for a third-country trial for the case, which could suggest that a trial in Scotland or the United States would not be fair. We cannot allow alleged terrorists to determine where they are tried.
Mr John Marshall Everyone agrees that the Lockerbie disaster was a great human tragedy. Is it not incumbent on hon Members to congratulate the Scottish police on their investigation, to emphasise that Scottish justice would be even-handed between the alleged criminals and the forces of law, and to condemn those in the House who act as apologists for the evil terrorists of Libya?
Lord James Douglas-Hamilton I have confidence in the Scottish system of criminal justice, which is one of the best in the world. I do not believe that attempts to have a trial elsewhere in Europe would succeed. The Libyans have given no indication that they would co-operate with such attempts.
Mr Dalyell On a point of order, Madam Speaker. In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I shall try to get my 11th Adjournment debate on the subject.

Tuesday 16 December 2008

A response to Richard Marquise

[I am deeply grateful to Peter Biddulph for allowing me to post the following response written by him to Richard Marquise's recent broadcast and print contributions to Lockerbie lore.]

1. It would appear that Mr Marquise never handled the fragment [of circuit board allegedly from the MST-13 timer that allegedly detonated the bomb], never saw the fragment. All his forensic information appears to have come from Thomas Thurman, proven to be a manipulator of prosecution reports by the US Department of Justice in 36 out of the 52 Thurman cases that they investigated.

And yet Thurman too never saw the fragment or handled it. When challenged by journalists, he admitted that he had worked solely on photographs supplied by the Scottish police and Thomas Hayes. And the evidence he gave on US TV about identifying the fragment was given as a voice-over using photographs of a sample from the CIA's own laboratory in Langley, Virginia.

Thurman, by resigning and "leaving" the employ of the FBI avoided being a witness at the trial, and his claims and record regarding the fragment were never tested in court. All references to Thurman in the trial transcript took "a priori" that he was on the team who found the fragment that proved Libya did it. His questionable history was never challenged by the defence. Were they negligent?

2. Mr Marquise's senior FBI colleague Oliver Revell never saw the fragment, never handled the fragment. In a televised discussion in 1995 on UK Channel Four TV he claimed :

". . . And we were operating on the premise that [Iran] was the responsible party. But we simply could not bring to bear all of the information we had, and the evidence, and make it fit. And then when the item – the microchip – was found and was identified – and by the way it was through both RARDE and Tom Thurman of the FBI laboratory – independently – that we found the other connection, and then we started working on that." (My italics).

So, whatever might be said by the FBI now, their case in 1991 centred entirely upon the provenance of the fragment of the bomb said to have been found in July 1989 by Dr Thomas Hayes. Should Hayes' evidence be in any way suspect, the case would collapse.

Mr Marquise has claimed elsewhere that the retirement of the CIA's Vincent Cannistraro took place before the key evidence was found. He has said that to for us to say otherwise is wrong.

Well, it's not wrong. Cannistraro was busy as head of the Lockerbie team when Hayes claimed to have found the fragment. Cannistraro retired a year and a half later, in November 1990.

3. The chief identification witness, Tony Gauci, was exposed in 2005 by the very man who - in 1991 - helped with the indictments against Megrahi and Fhimah, former Lord Advocate Peter Fraser. In Fraser's own words, Gauci could not be trusted.

And now a Mr Clancy [Ronnie Clancy QC] of the Scottish Crown team has conceded in a recent Scottish High Court hearing in Edinburgh that even if Gauci's evidence is discredited, it would not significantly affect the prosecution case. A strange claim and admission indeed. Are they already conceding the case in total? [RB: What Mr Clancy said was that the Crown’s view was that there was sufficient evidence to justify Megrahi’s conviction even if Gauci’s evidence were discounted.]

4. Marquise's information regarding the British forensic tracing of the fragment came from Dr Thomas Hayes.

At the time of the trial, Hayes' record in the case of the IRA Maguire Seven (Guildford bombing) was never discussed in court. All that the judges heard was an oblique reference to "deliberate falsehoods" told by his former colleague and supervisor Dr Higgs in another IRA case, that of Judith Ward.

Since Hayes had not been part of that particular Higgs episode, he could - and did - deny all connection or knowledge of that particular Higgs conspiracy. The trial then moved on without further comment or question.

And yet Hayes was central to a Higgs conspiracy in another IRA trial, that of the Maguire Seven, in which the Hayes and Higgs were proved by Parliamentary investigation to have conspired to with-hold evidence that might assist the defence case.

But since the Maguire Seven story was not rehearsed in the Lockerbie trial, none of this could be considered by the Lockerbie judges.

I believe that if Hayes' history in the case of the Maguire Seven had been examined in court, his testimony in the case of Lockerbie would have been discredited in the same way as that of Majid Giaka, the double CIA and Libyan agent.

In his book Scotbom, and since, Mr Marquise gives the impression that American investigation was led and controlled by the FBI. In fact it was controlled overall by the CIA, and by certain people with much blood and lies on their hands. Among the White House team around that time were people proven by declassified documents to understand well the technique of the manufacture of evidence to destabilise Middle Eastern governments. These documents are now freely available. But nobody - including the media in both countries - seems to care any more. It's old news, unwelcome news. People die, so what? Life must go on etc.

All of this, naturally, never came to the attention of the Lockerbie judges. Hopefully the second appeal will offer a long overdue opportunity for the true back-story of Lockerbie to emerge.

If Mr Marquise wishes to challenge any of the above, I will gladly supply the document dates and references with appropriate quotations. I will also arrange for sections of the film and television records to be put on the web. And I will ensure that relevant sections of the trial transcript are also put on the web. People can then judge for themselves where this story might go over the next six months.