Jaajef wa G-L,
With the Lockerbie bombing again coming up in the news I reproduce this very informative and interesting article looking at the case from a different perspective than the one usually put out by the media. Long but well worth a read.
Yeenduleen ak jaama
Tony
What if they are
innocent?
A decade after Lockerbie, the West has
at last got its men: two Libyans who
London and Washington say planted the
bomb that killed 270 people. But the case
is not that open-and-shut, says Russell
Warren Howe. Look at the facts, and you
enter a murky world of espionage and
double-bluff. Palestinian ˇterrorists', the
Iranian government and Israeli intelligence
each had motives for blowing up Flight
PA103. So who had the most to gain?
Saturday April 17, 1999
More than ten years after the fatal crash of a Pan Am
airliner on the Scottish village of Lockerbie on
December 21, 1988, two Libyan Air officials who ran
the airline's office in Valletta, Malta, are to go on trial
before a Scottish court in Holland. They are accused
of putting, or allowing to be put, into possibly
unaccompanied luggage a barometrically-fused bomb
that later exploded over Lockerbie.
After laborious personal intervention in Libya by UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan - as well as his
Swedish chief legal counsel, Hans Corell; Jakes
Gerwel, director of President Nelson Mandela's
private office; and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi
Arabia's ambassador to the US - Libya's often
eccentric leader, Colonel Muammar Gadafy, finally
consented to the extradition of Abd-el Basset Megrahi
and Lamin Khalifa F'hima. The word was passed by
Libya's UN envoy to Annan, to whom Britain and the
US had assigned the task of negotiating with Gadafy.
The notion of creating a Scottish court on a
mothballed Dutch Nato base is Libyan - and original,
as is the Scottish judiciary's decision to replace the
normal Scottish jury of 15 persons with a three-judge
bench. It was thought that to send 15 Scots (plus
reserve jurors, in case of illness or death) to live in a
Dutch hotel for a year or more would be an
unreasonable imposition.
Once the Scottish court in exile gets organised, the
trial will be lengthy, in part because of the need to
interpret examination, testimony and bench rulings
between four languages - Libyan Arabic, English,
Maltese and German - and to translate documents
and court proceedings. Witnesses will be brought and
lodged, at some expense, from afar.
More often than not, whenever police anywhere arrest
a murder suspect, most people assume he's guilty.
And when prosecutors put him in court, a conviction is
expected. Certainly, in this instance, public opinion in
the US and, to a lesser extent, in Britain has been so
conditioned by official statements that it is all but
assumed that the Lord Advocate - Andrew, Lord
Hardie, who is Scotland's chief prosecutor - has an
open-and-shut case. Most relatives of the victims,
especially those in the US, seem to expect the two
Libyans to be sentenced to lengthy imprisonment in
Scotland. This outcome is, however, far from sure: the
three Scottish judges will certainly hear the theory that
the suspects acted out of revenge, but they will also
hear of sophisticated disinformation operations on the
part of various intelligence agencies, and conflicting
accounts of whether the bomb was set on its way in
Valletta or Frankfurt.
The Lockerbie saga is generally believed to have
begun on July 3, 1988, when a "missile-control
specialist" aboard the US frigate Vincennes mistook
an Iran Air airliner on a routine flight to Saudi Arabia
for a MiG-25 and shot it down over the Persian Gulf,
killing everyone on board. The Vincennes was
escorting a Kuwaiti tanker carrying Iraqi oil and flying
the Stars and Stripes, because of the eight-year war
between Iran and Iraq.
President Ronald Reagan mishandled the resulting
furore, hesitating to apologise for the horrific mistake
and even suggesting that the airliner should have
identified itself - not normal protocol. Weeks later,
someone fired a shot at the wife of the Vincennes'
skipper as she left a Californian supermarket - she
wasn't hit, and the gunman was never found, but the
incident won the attention of the Reagan
administration, and compensation for the loss of life
and of the aircraft was paid, albeit at the minimum
rates required by international law. To add insult to
injury, the Vincennes' captain received two
decorations for his escort work.
By then, however, it seemed to the outside world that
Tehran had already taken matters into its own hands:
five-and-a-half months after the Iran Air catastrophe,
Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York via
London was blown out of the sky by a bomb,
apparently fused to explode at a specific altitude -
most likely, cruising altitude, usually 28,000-40,000ft
for airliners flying in the jet stream. PA103's bomb
may have been fused to explode at just over 28,000ft.
It may have gone off prematurely. Presumably to climb
above foul weather, PA103 reached, or was
approaching, its designated cruising altitude while still
in the Prestwick Air Traffic Control zone - the jump-off
point for many trans-Atlantic flights from Europe - and
instead of conveniently disappearing without trace into
the Atlantic, as an Air India plane bombed by Sikh
separatists had done a few years before, came down
on Lockerbie. British investigators, and specialists
from the FBI and the US National Transportation and
Safety Board, analysed the remains of the plane and
identified a possibly unaccompanied suitcase bearing
tags that, they later said, indicated that it had been
marked by Libyan Air to fly on Air Malta from Valletta
to Frankfurt, and then to be transferred to the Pan Am
flight for London and the connecting flight to New York.
Suspicion that the two Libyan Air officials in Valletta at
the time, Megrahi and F'hima, were responsible was
heightened by US intelligence reports that it had
intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan
government office in Berlin on December 22, 1988,
that said, in effect, "mission accomplished".
In 1991, armed with the details of this intercept and
the results of the long investigation at Lockerbie, the
UN Security Council adopted a proposal by the UK
and the US that Libya allow either Scotland or the US
to extradite the two officials, who had been branded
"intelligence agents" by the Western press. When
Libya, denying its own and the two men's involvement,
declined to hand them over, the Security Council
imposed sanctions in 1992, the most important of
these being a ban on air links to Libya and on the sale
to Libya of arms and certain oil-drilling equipment.
Libya claims that the sanctions have cost it some $31
billion over the past seven years.
Libya responded with an offer to allow the two men to
be extradited for trial by the country of primary
jurisdiction, Malta, where the alleged crime allegedly
took place. The two men publicly stated their
willingness to prove their innocence in Valletta, while
Malta's then charg* d'affaires in Washington said that
his government was prepared to hold the trial,
provided the Security Council added "Malta" to
"Scotland" and "the United States" in the resolution. In
anticipation of such a request, he had prepared a
press kit on the Maltese judiciary: like most British
ex-colonies, it doesn't have a jury system, and tries
major cases before a three-judge bench. This is the
system common to almost every major country -
Japan, for example -without a jury-based legal system,
and one that has now been copied by Scotland for this
particular case; it means that the prosecutor need
convince only two judges out of three, instead of 13 or
14 jurors out of 15.
President Bush said he would veto any such
amendment to the Security Council resolution. John
Major concurred. A State Department source told me
at the time that, as Malta was so close geographically
to Libya, it was feared that even a Commonwealth
judiciary could be "bought".
Libya's moody leader, Muammar Gadafy, just
shrugged his diplomatic shoulders and concentrated
on domestic affairs. However, pressure from relatives
of the dead passengers soon forced Tripoli to come
up with a new initiative. In 1994, Gadafy accepted the
Security Council's choice of a Scottish court, provided
it sat in a neutral country, away from the lynch-mob
public atmosphere in Scotland or the US. He
suggested Holland, the seat of the International Court,
a largely civil-law facility, but London and Washington
still demurred. Then, in 1998, the UK agreed to
Gadafy's plan - British diplomats assumed that the US
would soon "come to heel", and it did.
Yet Libya's mistrust of the "plaintiffs", especially
Washington, remained, and was returned in good
measure. In 1991, soon after the original Security
Council resolution, the prominent Washington lawyer
Plato Cacheris (in the news more recently as Monica
Lewinsky's legal advisor) took over as legal counsel to
the Libyan government. He flew to Tripoli, he says,
solely to explain what would happen if Libya allowed
New York to extradite the two men. When I suggested
to Cacheris that he surely must have told the suspects
that they would inevitably be tried in advance by the
media, and that it would be nearly impossible to find
an unprejudiced jury and that the trial would be turned
into a TV spectacular, he chuckled: "I leave it to your
imagination."
But no one ever really expected Libya to choose New
York, where an exuberant Israeli lobby was calling for
Gadafy's head. Around two-thirds of the 259
passengers and crew killed (along with 11 Scottish
townspeople) were New Yorkers or other Americans
heading home for the Christmas holidays. Alastair
Duff, the Edinburgh barrister who now leads the
defence team with Libya's Kamal Hasan al-Maghur,
went to Tripoli in 1991 to advise on the Scottish
system. He is as reluctant as Cacheris to discuss
what he said. He makes no criticism of the Scottish
judiciary, but says that the Scottish prison system is to
be avoided at all costs, especially by people who
speak little English and who observe Islamic dietary
and other religious requirements - and who might not
be looked on kindly by Scottish convicts were they
found guilty of killing 11 "guid" folk in Lockerbie.
One of Duff's first concerns, when Britain and the US
finally agreed to a Scottish trial in Holland, was to
obtain assurances that, if acquitted, the two men could
fly home at once. The State Department, similarly
distrustful, feared that, if convicted, the two men would
flee. At America's behest, the Crown Office in
Edinburgh insisted that the trial be held not in the UN
premises of the International Court, but at Camp Zeist,
a Nato facility.
The defence team agreed to Camp Zeist, but only on
the understanding that, once the men were acquitted,
a charter plane, probably Italian, would fly them
straight home without refuelling en route. Since
Scottish law does not allow bail in murder cases, the
men were to be detained in the facilities for accused
officers at Camp Zeist. Among the other issues that
delayed the two men's arrival in Holland was US
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's insistence
that the prosecution be allowed to introduce secret US
evidence in camera, "to protect intelligence sources".
But this would raise the possibility that the court might
find the two men guilty without being able to explain,
publicly, why. In the event, all evidence will be public.
The Lord Advocate has also agreed not to ask the
men what they know about Libyan intelligence, and
that they will not be re-interviewed by British or foreign
(read: US) police or intelligence after the trial unless
they consent to this.
Libya requested that, if convicted, the men should
serve their term in Libya, Malta or Holland, but the
defence, under pressure from the British Foreign
Office, could only secure constant access to lawyers
and medical care, the right to be monitored in prison
by the UN, and, despite the absence of normal
diplomatic relations between London and Tripoli,
Libya's right to establish a consulate in Edinburgh to
watch over the men's interests.
The defence clearly resents the pressure applied by
the British Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine: "Lord Irvine's
a Scot, but he presides over the English courts, not
the Scottish courts. He has no more right to an opinion
in this case than has Boris Yeltsin!" says their
barrister, Alastair Duff.
To say that Gadafy and his cabinet are now entirely
comfortable with seeing the two Libyans placed
beyond their protection would be an exaggeration: for
the trial to become possible it took assurances from
the Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity
(Libya is a member of both) to watch over the two
men's safety and rights.
Now, as a trial looms, some basic questions remain,
and various theories abound: Why was Libya thought
to have gone out on a limb to avenge a non-Arab
country, Iran? Was Iran "fingered" simply because it
had a motive?
Why was the authenticity of US intelligence's
Tripoli-Berlin intercept not challenged by Washington
and London, given the fact that a similar intercept had
earlier been mistakenly used by the Reagan regime to
blame Libya for a bomb which exploded at a Berlin
club on April 5, 1986, and to justify the US bombing of
Tripoli and Benghazi nine days later, which killed
Gadafy's infant adopted daughter in a brash attempt
to kill the Libyan leader himself? Although Britain had
accepted the authenticity of the intercept concerning
the bombing of the La Belle disco - in which two
American soldiers and a Turkish girl were killed - and
allowed the US Air Force to take off on the raid from
Lakenheath, France and Germany were unconvinced
and concluded that the bomb had been the work of
local Iranian militants.
Victor Ostrovsky, a Canadian former intelligence
colonel with Israel's Mossad secret service and author
of the bestseller By Way Of Deception (the title comes
from the Mossad motto), will testify that it was Mossad
commandos who set up the transmitter in Tripoli that
generated a false signal about the "success" of the
Berlin bomb - he has already given a detailed
description of this daring operation in his second
book, The Other Side Of Deception. Ostrovsky, who
will testify by closed-circuit television from somewhere
in North America - he fears that, if he comes to
Holland, he may be "Vanunu-ed" (ie kidnapped and
smuggled back to Israel) for breaking his secrets oath
- will state that the Lockerbie intercept so resembles
the La Belle intercept as to have probably the same
provenance. This is what US lawyers call the "duck"
argument: "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck,
and waddles, the preponderance of evidence is that it
is a duck."
Ostrovsky's evidence would then put the onus on the
Lord Advocate to prove that the Lockerbie intercept is
genuine, not disinformation. Ostrovsky believes that,
in both bombings, Israel implicated Libya to shield
Iran, thereby encouraging Iran not to persecute its
small Jewish community. For the defence, a key
element will be: did Iran play any role at all in the crime
that "avenged" Iran Air? Or did Mossad delude
London, Washington and the Security Council not to
divert suspicion from Iran but from their own alleged
"active measures" against the airliner?
Pan Am's insurers, in anticipation of lawsuits from
victims' families (which were eventually to contribute to
the famous old airline's bankruptcy), carried out its
own investigation. This came up with revelations even
more startling than Ostrovsky's. The investigative
agency retained by the airline was Interfor, a New York
firm founded by Yuval Aviv, a former Mossad staffer
who emigrated to America in 1979. Aviv's task was to
prove that any blame for poor security was not Pan
Am's, but Frankfurt airport's. In his report, he cites,
without identifying them, six broad intelligence
sources whom he rates as "good" or "very good", and
one intelligence agency, that of a "Western-oriented
government", graded "excellent". The only other
"excellent" source is "the experienced director of
airport security for the most security-conscious
airline". Clearly, the agency is Aviv's old shop,
Mossad, and the airline is Israel's El Al.
In his new book on Mossad, Gideon's Spies, Gordon
Thomas says that - according to a source at LAP, the
psychological warfare wing of Mossad - "within hours
of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to
their media contacts urging them to publicise that here
was ˇincontrovertible proof' that Libya, through its
intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable".
Yet Aviv proved fairly convincingly that the bomb was
placed in Frankfurt, and he implicated a Palestinian
resistance movement. His Interfor report concludes
that the bombing was directed not at the US airliner
per se, but at a small unit of US military intelligence -
members of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) -
that had uncovered a drugs-smuggling ring in
Lebanon.
The ring was run by a "rogue" CIA unit working in
collusion with Hizbullah, the resistance movement to
Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. Some of the
funds generated were intended to buy the freedom of
six US hostages held by Hizbullah (which was
bankrolled by Iran). DIA sources say that the
CIA-Hizbullah drug ring was set up by Mossad agents,
who had penetrated Hizbullah and were the local
Arabic-speaking traffic managers for the CIA. At the
same time, Israel would sell elderly US missiles, at
ample profit, to Iran; a skim from both drugs and arms
profits would be used, as part of Irangate, to subsidise
the Contras, the right-wing terrorist movement in
Nicaragua so favoured by Reagan and the iniquitous
Oliver North.
Aviv carefully doesn't mention Mossad's role in all this,
but implies that his detailed revelations come from his
"excellent" (ie Mossad) source. It is certainly a known
fact that Washington, while tilting toward Iraq in the
Iraq/Iran war (and escorting its tankers), sent a
delegation to Tehran to arrange the purchase of the
Israeli missiles - which would, of course, be used
against Iraq.
The Interfor report affirms that the Samsonite suitcase
containing the bomb, adorned with luggage tags
indicating that it originated from Valletta, actually
began its journey in Frankfurt, where it was substituted
for a suitcase of a similar kind. Aviv claims that
German security has videotape of a Muslim
luggage-handler taking the case into Frankfurt airport,
but says that this tape was "lost" and that the CIA
refuses to produce its own copy.
Without contradicting Aviv, Thomas and others
believe the tagging and smuggling aboard of the lethal
suitcase can most easily be ascribed to a sayan or
mabuah working for Mossad, which had a motive for
eliminating certain passengers. (A sayan is a Jew
who puts loyalty to Israel above loyalty to his own
country and does services, usually unpaid, for
Mossad; according to Thomas, the most famous
sayan working in the UK was Robert Maxwell. A
mabuah is a Gentile who fulfils the same role.)
The report says that the CIA-Hizbullah drugs habitually
travelled to New York under CIA protection, in
baggage marked "inspected" by a Turkish
baggage-handler at Frankfurt and substituted for a
legitimate piece of baggage, so that the number of
luggage items tallied with the airline's manifest.
According to Aviv, a Palestinian group had learned of
the CIA-Hizbullah-Mossad drugs traffic, and had got a
Syrian baggage-handler to make a similar substitution
to put the case with a bomb on board Flight PA103.
Aviv still believes this to be the explanation for the
disaster; but he has no name for the Syrian, or for the
Turk involved in the drug shipments. How many
Syrians could there possibly have been on the
airport's payroll?
(The Valletta-Frankfurt-London-New York baggage
tags, and the "inspected" label, if they bear the two
Libyans' fingerprints, could have been transferred to
the bomb case at Valletta or Frankfurt. Air Malta
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