Thursday 28th of November 2024
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railroaded .....

railroaded .....

Amid all the bellowing about the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in 1988, all current commentary ignores the hippo in the room - which is the powerful evidence that Megrahi was innocent, framed by the US and British security services and originally found guilty because Scottish judges had their arms brutally twisted by Westminster.

The conviction was one of the great judicial scandals of the 20th Century.

The original Lockerbie trial took place in 2000, in Zeist, Holland. It was presided over by three Scottish judges who travelled to the Netherlands courthouse, convicting Megrahi and acquitting his colleague, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah.

In a trenchant early criticism of the verdict, Hans Koechler, a distinguished Austrian philosopher appointed as one of five international observers at the trial by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, issued a well-merited denunciation of the judges' bizarre conclusion.

"In my opinion," Koechler said, "there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict." Koechler queried the active involvement of senior US Justice Department officials as part of the Scotch prosecution team "in a supervisory role".

In essence, the case was based (a) on the presumption that the bomb timer on the PanAm plane was from a batch sold by a Swiss firm to Libya; (b) that fragments of clothing retrieved from the crash site and identified as having been in the suitcase that contained the bomb had been bought by the accused Megrahi from a shop in Malta; and (c) that a "secret witness," Abdulmajid Gialka, a former colleague of the accused pair in the Libyan Airlines office in Malta, would testify that he had observed them either constructing the bomb or at least seen them loading it onto the plane in Frankfurt.

The prosecution was unable to produce evidence to substantiate any of these points or to encourage any confidence in Gialka's reliability as a witness. The Swiss manufacturer of the timer, Edwin Bollier, testified that he had sold timers of a similar type to the East Germans and conceded, under cross-examination by defence lawyers, that he had connections to many intelligence agencies, including not only the Libyans but also the CIA.

By the time of the trial, Gialka had been living under witness protection in the US. He had received $320,000 from his American hosts and, in the event of conviction of the accused, stood to collect up to $4 million in reward money. He had CIA connections, so the defence lawyers learned, before 1988.

The prosecution's case absolutely depended on proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Megrahi was the man who bought the clothes, traced by police to a Maltese clothes shop. In 19 separate statements to police prior to the trial, the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, had failed to make a positive identification of Megrahi.

In the witness box, Gauci was asked five times if he recognised anyone in the courtroom. No answer. Finally, the exasperated prosecutor pointed to the dock and asked if the man sitting on the left was the customer in question. The best Gauci could do was mumble that "he resembles him".

How Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Libya were framed for Lockerbie bombing

home alone .....

American anger at the early release from jail last year of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi is bubbling up again as British witnesses invited to appear before next week's US Senate hearing are either stalling or refusing outright to attend.

Non-US citizens are not bound to appear before Senate hearings of this kind. But following David Cameron's visit to the White House this week, it was assumed some degree of cooperation would be forthcoming. Cameron himself said his government would "in terms of the congressional hearing, make sure that proper co-operation is extended to it".

Instead, the hearing, scheduled July 29, looks increasingly like being a damp squib, with Scottish politicians definitely refusing their invitations, and everyone else on this side of the Atlantic humming and hawing.

Their procrastination is understandable. They've all seen Tony Hayward get the whipping-boy treatment on Capitol Hill over the BP oil spill.

And as Jack Straw put it yesterday, it is "highly unusual for the legislature of one sovereign state to conduct an inquiry into decisions of another sovereign state", even if more than half the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing were Americans.

Will anybody attend the US Lockerbie hearing?

more inconevenient truths .....

I was completely astounded this evening when I came about an article that questioned the "scientific inquiry" into the sinking of the Cheonan, the South Korean corvette allegedly sunk by the North Korean navy.The validity of the investigation was questioned by two American investigators from John Hopkins University and the University of Virginia. Researchers J.J. Suh and Seung-Hun Lee cast doubts over the investigation conducted by the South Korean Joint Investigation Group (JIG). According to Suh and Lee;

"The only conclusion one can draw on the basis of the evidence is that there was no outside explosion," Suh said. "The JIG completely failed to produce evidence that backs up its claims that there was an outside explosion."

The International investigation claimed that the ship was sunk by with a North Korean torpedo. According to the two investigators, there was no indication that the outside of the ship was damaged. They also questioned a fragment of the so-called "torpedo" that had the Korean word for 1 written in what looked like a blue marker. They questioned how the blue writing on the fragment could have remained while the rest of the torpedo fragments were subjected to extreme heat, the kind that usually follows an explosion.

This comes about the day before U.S. and South Korean military forces are conducting joint military maneuvers in the South China Sea, maneuvers that have escalated tensions not only between the U.S., South Korea and Pyongyang, but have also heightened tensions between the U.S. and China which considers the South China Sea part of its territorial waters.

The article by the two researchers is interesting in itself and just by the content it should have received the attention of the mainstream media considering that huge military maneuvers are to be held today in response to the general assumption that the North Korean navy sunk the South Korean warship in disputed waters. What I found to be more curious wasn't that the mainstream media didn't report on this story, but that the Voice of America, a semi-official mouthpiece for the government of the United States did.

Have we gotten to the point where we have so effectively muzzled the mainstream press that they have become more selective in their reporting of anything that might cast doubt on the official government "spin" on things than agencies of the government like the Voice of America? I seems like they have more freedom to report than the mainstream press. This report by Mr. Suh and Mr. Lee calls for a wider investigation. The fact that the government appears to have taken the lead in exposing what may be an attempt to defraud the International community is also something that should be looked into. This may be a first; A semi-official government agency exposing government propaganda.

The Sinking Of The Cheonan, Too Weird To Make Up