Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed
John Pilger
3 Sept 2009
In his latest column for the New Statesman,
John Pilger describes the suppression of facts behind the furore over the
"compassionate" release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdelbaset Ali
Mohmed al-Megrahi. He writes that Megrahi was "in effect blackmailed by the
governments of Scotland and England" so that it would not be revealed in his
appeal that he had been framed for a crime he did not commit.
The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much
about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially
Britain. From Gordon Brown’s “repulsion” to Barack Obama’s “outrage”, the
theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves
journalists. “But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?” whined a BBC
reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. “What will you say to
your constituents, then?”
Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he
“pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice
minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi
to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power”. Amen.
The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling
brook of bullshit”. Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi’s release.
No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan
Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in
which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect
blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate
release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had
Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately
suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more
than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic
interests”.
“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert
Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed
by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of
justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have
bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft – he was
convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the
clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even
failed to recognise him in the courtroom.
The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb
timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in
Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of
an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the
bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two
airports undetected to Flight 103.
A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi
and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb
on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a
“protected witness”. The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to
collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.
Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in
“neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through
the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark
investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions
and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of
conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found
Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page “opinion”,
wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the
history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie – the Flight from
Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from the
Private Eye website for £5).
Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had
reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when
they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He
named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she
killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had
promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr
on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their
intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had
been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the
shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial
waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was
awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in
the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer”.
Peversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s
support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American
oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like
lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In
almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and open
warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was
inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under
Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely
bomber; it was to be centrepiece of Megrahi’s defence.
In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case
for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham
Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have
found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the
applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”
The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furore,
with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face
justice from that “higher power”. What a disgrace.