-Caveat Lector-
Yardbird wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> Lockerbie was an impossible verdict
Lockerbie was a cover-up for US foreign policy. It diverted the guilt
from the perpetrators - The Palestinian PFLP-GC, and their partners,
Syrian intelligence, and shifted it to the Libyans.
J2
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4206312,00.html
>
> The conviction left a disturbing list of unanswered questions
>
> Richard Norton-Taylor
> Guardian
>
> Tuesday June 19, 2001
>
> On January 31, after an eight-month trial, three Scottish judges, sitting
> in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, found a Libyan
> intelligence officer, Ali Al-Megrahi, guilty of the Lockerbie bombing -
> Britain's biggest mass murder - acquitting his colleague, Khalifa Fhimah.
>
> Two days earlier, senior Foreign Office officials briefed a group of
> journalists in London. They painted a picture of a bright new chapter in
> Britain's relations with Colonel Gadafy's regime. They made it quite clear
> they assumed both the Libyans in the dock would be acquitted.
>
> The FO officials were not alone. Most independent observers believed it
> was impossible for the court to find the prosecution had proved its case
> against Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt.
>
> It was not only the lack of hard evidence - something the judges admitted
> in their lengthy judgment. The case was entwined, if the judges were
> right, in a sequence of remarkable coincidences.
>
> Doubts about the prosecution's case and the judges' verdict are spelled
> out in Cover-Up of Convenience, published this week. Two journalists, John
> Ashton and Ian Ferguson, examine in detail what Paul Foot has already
> succinctly written in Private Eye's special report, Lockerbie, The Flight
> from Justice.
>
> For more than a year, western intelligence agencies pointed to the Popular
> Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, led by Ahmed
> Jibril. It is not hard to see why. Two months before the Lockerbie
> disaster, German police arrested members of the PFLP-GC near Frankfurt
> where, according to the prosecution, the bag containing the bomb was
> placed on the Pan Am airliner.
>
> Among those arrested was Marwan Khreesat, who was found with explosives
> and a Toshiba cassette player similar to the one said to have contained
> the bomb. Khreesat was released. It was later revealed he was a Jordanian
> double agent.
>
> The Jordanians did not allow him to appear as a witness at the trial.
> Instead, he was interviewed by an FBI agent, Edward Marshman. Marshman
> described how Khreesat told him how he infiltrated the PFLP-GC, how a
> second Toshiba bomb had gone missing, and about his contacts with another
> member of Jibril's group, Abu Elias, said to be an expert in airline
> security.
>
> Elias is mentioned in a report written by Mobdi Goben, another member of
> the PFLP-GC, shortly before he died. The Goben memorandum claims Elias
> planted the bomb in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese American
> passenger allegedly involved in a CIA-approved heroin-smuggling operation.
> The luggage used for these operations, it is claimed, bypassed normal
> security screening.
>
> The prosecution asked a "foreign government", believed to be Syria, to
> hand over information about Goben's allegations. Syria refused. Syria was
> central to the original explanation. This was that the bombing was funded
> by Iran in retaliation for the mistaken shooting down of an Iranian
> airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes, over the Persian Gulf
> in July 1988.
>
> There is a widespread view that the US and Britain changed their tack when
> they badly needed Syria's support, and Iran's quiescence, for the Gulf war
> after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They thus fingered the two
> Libyans, insisting they placed the bomb in an unaccompanied bag at Malta's
> Luqa airport, where it was transferred to the Pan Am plane at Frankfurt.
> An earlier Palestinian suspect, Abu Talb, had also visited Malta. He was
> later held in Sweden on terrorist charges and identified by the British as
> a prime suspect.
>
> You don't have to look for conspiracies - maybe Jaafar's presence on the
> plane has an entirely innocent explanation - to question the prosecution's
> version of events. US authorities issued a series of specific warnings
> about a bomb threat before Lockerbie. These, and intelligence reports
> implicating Iran, were dismissed as speculative or hoaxes.
>
> The evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner was extremely shaky. He
> was uncertain about dates and the weather that day. He told the police the
> purchaser was "six foot or more" and over 50. Megrahi was five foot eight
> inches and 37 at the time.
>
> According to Ashton and Ferguson, replica MST-13 timers - implicating
> Megrahi but only presented as evidence after a long delay - were
> manufactured by the CIA but that information was not passed to the
> defence. The evidence of Abdul Giaka, a Libyan who defected to the CIA and
> star prosecution witness, was described by the judges as "at best
> exaggerated, at worst simply untrue".
>
> The judgment is littered with assumptions and criticisms of prosecution
> witnesses. They refer to a "mass of conflicting evidence". Megrahi has
> lodged an appeal. The Scottish appeal judges surely owe it to the victims'
> families to explain the string of unanswered questions.
>
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