CHICAGO: The people stand against NATO - Chicago Under Siege- Post-Mortem Justice? : Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi
Enrique Ferro
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The people stand against NATO
“NATO: Shut it Down! Wall Street: Shut it Down! Homeland Security: Shut it Down!” That forceful chant rang out as protesters, many thousands strong, marched on the NATO Summit on May 20 in Chicago. Responding with determination in the face of an organized campaign of government threats and intimidation aimed at anti-NATO protesters, an impressive number of young people, union members, antiwar organizations and community members filled the streets to demand “U.S./NATO Out of Afghanistan Now!” during the opening day of the NATO Summit. The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War and Poverty Agenda (CANG8) estimates the crowd size as about 15,000. In the week leading up to the NATO Summit, thousands of people marched and rallied in Chicago. The actions included a large rally of nurses demanding higher taxes on the rich and a march on Mayor Emanuel’s house, 1,000 people strong, which demanded “Health Care not Warfare!” People came in buses, by train and by car caravan from all over the country to take a stand in Chicago against imperialist war and capitalist austerity. In a moving display of solidarity with the people of Afghanistan and the Middle East at the end of the march, Afghanistan and Iraq veterans took off their medals and hurled them toward the NATO Summit grounds. One of those who returned his medals, Marine Vince Emmanuelli, said: “Our enemies are right here and we look at them every day. ... They are the millionaires and billionaires who control this planet and we’ve had enough of it.” (WBEZ Chicago) Months-long campaign against protesters Though the military machines of NATO are the greatest purveyors of violence in the world, local and federal law enforcement agencies and the media engaged in a months-long attack campaign against protesters and protest groups. The Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild set up a 24-hour hotline to provide support for people who were arrested before and during the NATO protest. Prior to the May demonstration, the NLG Chicago chapter reported: “More than two-dozen people had been arrested so far in the lead up to the NATO summit. At least 7 arrestees in addition to the ones with terrorism-related charges are currently in custody. “During a Wednesday night house raid, police broke down the doors of multiple apartment units with guns drawn and searched residences without a warrant or consent. In addition to 9 arrests made that night, NLG attorneys believe that two undercover police or confidential informants were arrested with the others and were later released. Of the 9 activists arrested, 6 were released without any charges despite being shackled for at least 18 hours in solitary confinement and denied access to attorneys.” At the May 20 mass march, a police mob surrounded and brutally attacked the demonstration as it was winding down, swinging their clubs at people’s heads and injuring many dozens. At least 45 people were arrested. Among those injured were ministers, community activists, journalists and others who tried to rescue people from police. ‘The people will not be bullied or silenced by the police and government’ The ANSWER Coalition in Chicago went all out to build the March on the NATO Summit, both through street outreach and social media outlets, and had a big presence at the protest with banners and placards and large amplified sound that unified large numbers of marchers with booming chants. The banners and placards read: “No War on Iran! Hands off Syria!”, “Troops Home Now! Money for Jobs and Education!”, “Unite the 99%: Fight Racism!” and “U.S./NATO Out of Afghanistan Now!” Asked what she thought of the protest, ANSWER organizer Ymelda Viramontes said: “Today’s protest shows that the people can and will resist the government and Wall Street’s attempts to bully and silence us. The number of people that came out into the streets of downtown today to show solidarity with the people of Afghanistan, Iran and Syria and demand no U.S. or NATO intervention—that’s a good indication that we can build a powerful movement against war and racism right here in the U.S.”
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Time for NATO to face new realities
NATO's Core Function is to Advance US Global Interests and
Foreign Policy Goals.
By Kate Hudson
May 21, 2012 London, UK - As Chicago prepares for the first North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) leaders' summit ever to be held on US soil, many will reflect on the organisation's strength, durability, and the way in which it has adapted to a changing world.
Indeed, few international institutions have undergone such an extreme makeover as NATO. From its ostensible origins as a defensive alliance facing off against the Soviet Union in 1949, it has seamlessly morphed into an openly aggressive, globe-straddling operation, whipping recalcitrant states into line in its self-appointed capacity as the righter of international wrongs. Vigilante-style, it can ride roughshod over the qualms of the United Nations - and often the restrictions of international law - to assert or impose its own view of peace and freedom. Occasionally it presents a softer face, protecting aid or pursuing humanitarian goals, yet no one is in any real doubt that NATO is all about hard power.
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Afghanistan to top NATO agenda |
But how long can it go on like this? While NATO may seem unstoppable and at the peak of its powers, this month's summit will showcase differences of opinion as well as increased inside and outside opposition. This is not in the least surprising because although major global jamborees like to present a successful business-as-usual image, the reality is that the core NATO states are facing some pretty serious problems that will undoubtedly affect the agenda.
The United States and Europe are experiencing massive economic crises, and the US has been fundamentally weakened by its poor economic performance and lack of internal investment over decades. As dynamic economic rivals have emerged, it is clear that the US cannot maintain its status as the single global superpower in an increasingly multi-polar world, nor is it desirable that it should do so. The fact is that while the US has declined in many respects, it has increasingly used NATO to support and advance its global power projection. But one big question is whether NATO states will continue to foot the bill.
A cursory glance at NATO's recent history shows that whatever its changing rationale, or the nature of its supposed enemies in the post-Cold War period, its core function has remained to advance US global interests and foreign policy goals. This became apparent at the end of the Cold War, when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved but NATO wasn't. Rather than scaling back its military presence, the US moved to fill the positions vacated by its previous rival. As the countries of eastern Europe embraced free-market economics and multiparty democracy, the US moved rapidly to integrate them into its sphere of influence via NATO expansion - faster than western Europe embraced eastern Europe via the European Union.
This was an effective strategy - indicated by the "new Europe" issue at the time of the war on Iraq - with Poland vigorously backing the US, against the "old Europe" of Germany and France. At NATO's 50th anniversary in Washington in April 1999, a new "Strategic Concept" was adopted. This moved beyond NATO's previous defensive role to include "out of area" - in other words, offensive - operations. The geographical area for action was now defined as the entire Eurasian landmass and the war on Afghanistan started soon after.
NATO's last leaders' summit in Portugal in November 2010 took the NATO vision beyond Eurasia, releasing a new Strategic Concept entitled "Active Engagement, Modern Defence". It recommitted to an expansive and interventionist military agenda with a projected global reach. This included an expansion of its area of work to "counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons" and, in the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, "securing failed states on the other side of the world".
It's an open question whether Cameron was referring to Afghanistan or whether he had a vision of new interventions, but it is certainly the case that the US will face problems over the Afghanistan intervention at this summit. This has been a NATO-led war since 2003, when it assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) established in 2002. Currently, there are almost 130,000 troops from 50 countries in Afghanistan under the auspices of ISAF, with NATO members providing most of the force. Most of these - about 99,000 - are US troops, 22,000 of which are due to return home this year. Clearly there is a strong drive within Washington itself to get the whole thing wound up. Earlier this year US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said that the administration wanted to wind up combat operations before the withdrawal deadline.
But US allies are already opting out. Last month Australia announced that it would be withdrawing most of its force of about 1,550 troops before Australia's 2013 elections, which is earlier than originally planned. Germany, which has 4,500 troops there, says it wants them home as soon as possible. But the biggest challenge on this front is likely to be newly-elected French President Francois Hollande. France already announced in February of this year that it wanted to bring home 1,000 of its 3,600 soldiers before the end of this year. Now President Hollande says he will bring them all of them home by then. Not surprisingly, the NATO wires are buzzing about how Hollande must be persuaded to reconsider, and one can only imagine the type of pressure he will be under. But the reality is that he will also be under pressure from the French people - and his standing as a new president. Sarkozy took France into an unprecedented level of cooperation with the US and NATO. It is hard to see how this will continue in the context of French political change and a shifting global political and economic balance.
The US is also going to face problems on the nuclear weapons front. It's well-known that NATO is a nuclear-armed alliance, but not that up to 200 US B61 nuclear bombs are stationed in five countries across Europe: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. There is increasingly strong opposition to these weapons, including from the governments of some of the "host" nations. This opposition is particularly strong from Germany, where Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has repeatedly called for their removal, which the US has refused.
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Chicago prepares for NATO summit |
There is no doubt that this issue will be discussed again and the US will be under increasing pressure to remove them. Of course there may be some desire from the administration to defer such a decision - which could be interpreted as weakness - until after the next US presidential election. But in reality, NATO's nuclear policies conflict with the legal obligations of the signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Articles 1 and 2 of the NPT forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapon states, and US/NATO nuclear weapons in Europe are located in non-nuclear weapons states. In spite of a recent softening of language on nuclear issues, and gestures towards a nuclear-free vision - particularly from Obama - NATO continues to assert its need to retain nuclear weapons. As the new Strategic Concept states: "The supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces." It rejects a policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons. In other words, NATO would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a first strike.
This position is not lost on the Russians, relations with whom will also doubtless be discussed at the summit. While the "hostile camp" tension that existed with the Soviet Union has vanished, at least in theory, Russia remains the chief military counter-weight and rival to the US and NATO on a global scale. The decision at the 2010 NATO summit to integrate the US missile defence system with a European theatre missile defence programme under the auspices of NATO has caused major problems in relations with Russia. Concerns remain that missile defence will enable the US to attack another country without fear of retaliation and US adherence to missile defence continues to threaten the survival of the new START Treaty on bilateral US/Russia nuclear reductions.
So the participants face some interesting and no doubt tough debates during their Chicago deliberations. They will also face noisy and significant protest from outside. NATO summits have been an increasing focus for anti-war and anti-nuclear protestors over the past few years - the demonstrations at the NATO summit in Strasbourg in 2009 were the largest in 30 years. Reports suggest that the tide of public opinion in the US is turning against NATO and particularly the war in Afghanistan. There is the cost issue of course, but also an increasing sentiment that war, with the death, mutilation and trauma it brings to those who actually fight it - let alone civilian victims - is just not the answer. This year, peace activists in the US will be joined not only by their European counterparts but also by US trade unionists and supporters of the Occupy movement which has made such an impact on US society over the past year.
The mood is clearly changing at many different levels. It's time for the NATO leadership to face the new realities.
Dr Kate Hudson was chair of the UK-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 2003 to September 2010, when she became general secretary. She is a leading anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigner nationally and internationally.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31391.htm
Chicago Under Siege
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Chicago-Under-Siege-by-Stephen-Lendman-120521-666.html
Contents of the Article:
NATO arrives everywhere violently. Chicago was no exception. During summit activities, city cops are enforcers. They specialize in serving wealth, power, and imperial interests.
Pepe Escobar has posted a new Article titled:
NATO Occupies Sweet Home Chicago
To view the new Article, please click here:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/NATO-Occupies-Sweet-Home-C-by-Pepe-Escobar-120520-317.html
Contents of the Article:
So Chicago is just a test run -- an advanced stage, compared to Gaza or Sadr City in Baghdad, of what the RAND corporation used to call MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). NATO after all has seen the future -- and is immersing itself body and soul in the "war of the drones."
Violent clashes between Chicago police and anti-NATO protesters (RAW VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1zTmhn3fv4&feature=digest_mon
'No cash for NATO adventures in Afghanistan, but Pentagon stays'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74wL08d9iC4&feature=digest_monNato talks security and peace, Chicago has neither
The paradox of such a city hosting this summit lays bare the brutal way in which inequality is globally maintained and locally replicated
Email-
- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 May 2012 21.00 BST
- Comments (115)
On Friday morning in Brighton Park, a neighbourhood in southwest Chicago, around half a dozen Latina volunteers in luminous bibs patrolled the streets around Davis Elementary school. The school sits in the crossfire of three gangs; the Kings, the 2/6s and the SDs (Satan's Disciples). The trees and walls nearby are peppered with "tags" denoting territory and mourning fallen gang members. There is a shooting in the area every couple of weeks, explains Mariela Estrada of the Brighton Park Neighbourhood Council, which facilitates the volunteers.
That same evening, just a couple of blocks away, a 14-year-old, Alejandro Jaime, was shot dead while out riding his bike with his 11-year-old friend. According to witnesses, a car knocked them both off their bikes. They picked themselves up and ran. A man got out of the car and shot Alejandro in the back. "Although it's the city's job to provide public safety, we had to respond since our children are in danger and continue to face threats of gang violence," said Nancy Barraza, a Parent Patrol volunteer.
The next morning world leaders started arriving in Chicago for the Nato summit where, just 20 minutes from Brighton Park, they would discuss how to maintain international security. The dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through security; in much of Chicago neither exists.
When the city mayor Rahm Emanuel brought the summit to Chicago he boasted: "From a city perspective this will be an opportunity to showcase what is great about the greatest city in the greatest country." The alternative "99% tour" of the city, organised by the Grassroots Collaborative that came to Brighton Park, revealed how utterly those who claim to export peace and prosperity abroad have failed to provide it at home.
The murder rate in Chicago in the first three months of this year increased by more than 50% compared with the same period last year, giving it almost twice the murder rate of New York. And the manner in which the city is policed gives many as great a reason to fear those charged with protecting them as the criminals. By the end of July last year police were shooting people at the rate of six a month and killing one person a fortnight.
This violence, be it at the hands of the state or gangs, is both compounded and underpinned by racial and economic disadvantage. The poorer the neighbourhood the more violent, the wealthier the safer. This is no coincidence. Much like the Nato summit – and the G8 summit that preceded it – the system is set up not to spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos but to contain and punish it.
Nato is not an impartial arbiter in this state of affairs but the military wing of a political and economic project that makes it possible. Neoliberal globalisation, and the inequities that come with it, cannot exist without force or the threat of it. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," Thomas Friedman, an ardent advocate of free market globalisation, argued. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
The paradox inherent in a city like Chicago hosting a summit like this not only lays bare the brutal nature in which these inequalities are maintained at a global level, but it lends us an opportunity to understand how those inequalities are replicated locally.
Chicago illustrates how the developing world is everywhere, not least in the heart of the developed. The mortality rate for black infants in the city is on a par with the West Bank; black life expectancy in Illinois is just below Egypt and just above Uzbekistan. More than a quarter of Chicagoans have no health insurance, one in five black male Chicagoans are unemployed and one in three live in poverty. Latinos do not fare much better. Chicago may be extreme in this regard, but it is by no means unique. While the ethnic composition of poverty may change depending on the country, its dynamics will doubtless be familiar to pretty much all of the G8 participants and most of the Nato delegates too.
The gated communities – like the one in which Trayvon Martin was killed – have been erected on a global scale to protect those fleeing the mayhem wrought by our economic and military policies. This was exemplified last March when a boat with 72 African refugees fled the Nato-led war in Libya. When the boat found itself stranded it sent out a distress signal that was passed on to Nato which had "declared the region a military zone under its control", and then promptly ignored it, as did an Italian ship. The boat bobbed around in the Mediterranean for two weeks. All but nine on board were left to die from starvation, thirst or in storms, including two babies.
"We can talk as much as we want about human rights and the importance of complying with international obligations," said Tineke Strik, the special rapporteur charged with investigating the case. "But if at the same time we just leave people to die – perhaps because we don't know their identity or because they come from Africa – it exposes how meaningless those words are." When Alejandro Jaime's parents hear Emanuel talk about "showcasing the greatest city in the greatest country", they doubtless receive his words with similar disdain.
Twitter: @garyyounge
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/20/chicago-nato-g8-summit-inequality
[05/20] The Dailies - Daily Dispatch From The NATO Protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E7OPc4IsQ1c
Published on May 21, 2012 by natoindymedia
The Daily's - Daily Dispatch From The NATO Protests
A
collection of video reports by grassroots journalists who are covering
the NATO Summit in Chicago. Be the media and help us by sending your
audio, video, and stills to submi...@natoprotest.org.
Streaming at: Livestream.com/chicagoindymedia
Produced at the
Chicago Independent Media
Convergence Center
By Chicago Indymedia
http://chicago.indymedia.org
me...@natoprotest.org
@natomedia
773-384-8544
Occupying Different Worlds: NATO and Its Citizens
Sunday, 20 May 2012 13:02 By JA Myerson, Truthout | Report
NATO protestors in Chicago, May 19, 2012. (Photo: Zach Roberts / GregPalast.com)“Health
care, not warfare!” was the slogan of the sizzling hot day Saturday as
hundreds of protesters flooded the tranquil tree-lined street where sits
4228 North Hermitage Ave., the residence of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
At issue was the Mayor’s recent decision to close six of twelve city
mental health clinics because of a budget crisis that is not so severe
as to prohibit the city from spending tens of millions of dollars to
host this weekend’s NATO summit.
Michael Hastings, author of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan,
was among the many journalists at the event. For him, this critique is
key. “We’re spending $700 billion a year on defense,” he told me. “We
spent $120 billion in 2011 in Afghanistan. The takeaway I got from the
protesters was that this money could be better spent at home than on
these different foreign policy adventures. The adventures have turned
out not to be very beneficial for most Americans or most Afghans
either.”
In
fact, the bind Afghans will find themselves in after American
withdrawal will be a central topic of discussion inside the halls of the
NATO summit. “Forget protests,” MSNBC gratuitously advised.
“NATO summit’s problem is Afghanistan.” There, as in the United States,
human well-being is subordinated well beneath wealthy interests’ drive
to accumulate capital.
Two years ago, the U.S. discovered nearly
$1 trillion in previously unknown iron, copper, cobalt, gold and
lithium deposits in Afghanistan, which General David H. Petraeus, then
commander of U.S. Central Command, hailed as showing “stunning
potential.” The Afghan Ministry of Mines has developed a “Business Plan”
for an “Investor Friendly Environment” in which the ministry will
“[improve] private sector’s access to Afghanistan’s mineral resources”
and “enable and facilitate domestic and international private investment
with the same rules for all.” Given the festering cesspool of
corruption that constitutes Afghanistan’s government and ownership
class, the last claim is somewhat dubious.
Shockingly,
though, the international community is having a very difficult time
coming up with money to support Afghanistan’s efforts to recover from
the decade of ruin to which the American military occupation has
relgated the impoverished country. The U.S. is set to pledge $2 billion
per year to this effort – compare this to the $100 billion per year that
the U.S. spent to maintain its recent military surge – and this is so
far the world’s largest pledge.
“In
many ways, the [NATO] summit is kabuki theater,” said Hastings. “Many
of these decisions have already been made, and this is the symbolic
effort to show that there’s a consensus about what to do in
Afghanistan.”
The
international negotiations around the minutiae of that consensus will
take place within the parameters of a very narrow ideological outlook
that essentially affirms the desirability of NATO’s cooperation in the
project of global U.S. military hegemony. The only people in Chicago who
will be providing an alternative vision for American foreign policy
will be the protesters, barred from entry into the discussions.
“Broadly, I think it’s very fair to say that those attending the summit
and those protesting on the streets are operating in completely separate
spheres,” according to Hastings, who also said that these summits are
held “in a bubble…and that’s intentional. That’s why there’s heavy
police presence.”
That presence got especially heavy last night, as Chicago police beat protesters with clubs and bikes, plowed into a group of protesters in a van, and surrounded the vehicle of livestream journalists Tim Pool and Luke Rudkowski who were cuffed and interrogated by police with guns drawn.
LIBYA UNDER PENTAGON-NATO RULE: Corruption, internecine conflict and the “fruits” of imperialist warfare
by Abayomi Azikiwe |
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Global Research, May 16, 2012 |
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Some 200 disgruntled rebels who fought with the Pentagon and NATO in the regime-change military mission against the Jamahiriya government in Libya during 2011, made an effort to assassinate the interim Prime Minister Abdurrahim al-Keib on May 8. The rebels were supposedly angry over the cancellation of monthly payments to the militiamen who served as ground troops in the campaign that overthrew the martyred leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The compensation program for the rebels, which distributed $US1.4 billion, has been riddled with fraud and consequently was suspended in April. There were reports that people were paid who were dead and that those who never joined the anti-Gaddafi efforts also received monies. In addition to these problems with public funds being turnover to rebel fighters, others were sent on trips abroad for medical treatment but were not injured. The militia groups served as the ground forces in the imperialist war against Libya that resulted in an arms embargo against the Gaddafi government, a naval blockade, sanctions, foreign assets seizure and bombing missions involving 26,000 sorties and 10,000 airstrikes. Corruption has been endemic to the so-called National Transitional Council (NTC) since its inception during the war last year. After being placed in power in Tripoli in late August 2011 and throughout the country after the brutal murder of Gaddafi on October 20, billions of dollars have gone missing from the national treasury. With the exposure of the widespread corruption in Libya, the interim finance minister Hassan Ziglam announced on May 11 that he would soon resign. The reason for his departure is the “wastage of public funds.” (Reuters, May 11) The interim prime minister al-Keib, who was the target of the assassination attempt, called those responsible for the shooting that left at least one person dead, “outlaws.” The various militia groups scattered throughout the capital of Tripoli and other parts of the country have never been brought into a national army. Ziglam, the outgoing finance minister, said of the incident on May 9, that “They came with weapons. How can you work in such an environment.” (Reuters, May 11) Other allegations of corruption over the last several months have included irregularities with the Libyan Investment Authority where some $US2.5 billion in oil revenues that were supposed to be transferred to the national treasury remains unaccounted for. Also the foreign assets that were frozen by the imperialist states in the early stages of the war on Libya remain a source of dispute in regard to the actual value of these funds. In the eastern oil-producing region of the country, the Arabian Gulf Oil Company has been hampered by work stoppages by employees who are demanding accountability from the executives running the firm. Although oil production has reportedly increased to a million barrels a day, there are questions about the utilization of revenue and the compensation of workers. Human Rights Violations Ignored by the Imperialists and Their Surrogates The rationale for the imperialist war on Libya during 2011 was that the Gaddafi government was violating the human rights of its citizens during an armed rebellion that was financed and coordinated by foreign interests. Despite the fact that no concrete evidence of mass killings and imprisonment were uncovered, this same narrative is being maintained as a justification for what transpired. Yet under the current NTC regime reports indicate that at least 7,000 people are still being detained inside the country with many of them suffering torture and extrajudicial killings. Even the United Nations, which through Resolutions 1970 and 1973 provided a pseudo-legal basis for the bombing of Libya and the overthrow of its government, has spoken out against the unjust incarceration by the Libyan rebels. According to Ian Martin, who heads the UN mission to Libya, “Cases of mistreatment and torture of detainees continue. Addressing these practices should be a top government priority in pursuit of a new culture of human rights and the rule of law.” (AFP, May 11) In April there were claims that three people were tortured to death in a prison in the coastal central city of Misrata. This prison has been notorious for its mistreatment of detainees and there are allegations that another seven people have been murdered there as well. The detainees are accused of fighting with the Libyan military in defense of the country that was being attacked internally and from the air and sea during 2011. Another method of arresting people is by outlawing any “glorification” of the former leader and government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The NTC government has passed a law that orders the militias to round up for prosecution anyone in support of the former political system that ruled the country for 42 years. Consequently the upcoming elections will bar political interests that still remain supportive of the Jamahiriya. Threats against supporters of the former Gaddafi government also extend outside of Libya. The previous oil minister and Prime Minister Dr.
Shokri Ghanem, was found dead in Vienna in late April floating in the
Danube River. Ghanem was being pressured to return to Libya by the NTC
to provide evidence for the further persecution of former members of the
government. In a Reuters interview in December 2011, the Boston
University graduate told a reporter in regard to the NTC rebels, “One
man they were interviewing, they threw him out of the window.” (Reuters,
May 13) Noman Benotman, an analyst and a long-time opponent of the
Gaddafi government, said of the death of Ghanem that “It was a
professionally executed crime. It is the global energy mafia. It’s to do
with corruption, secret deals. People wanted to make sure he is not
around anymore to talk.” (Reuters, May 13) The former officials of the Gaddafi government and
their supporters have been criminalized and many of them remain outside
the country. The entire registration process has been marred by
confusion and inconsistencies. At the same time in the southern region of Libya reports of ongoing sectional conflict continues. Many have been killed in fighting over the last several months between what is described as the Toubou people and Arab tribesmen. On May 14 the French Press Agency (AFP) reported that “A candidate in the upcoming poll for a constituent assembly was murdered in Libya’s southern desert on Sunday shortly after submitting his registration. ‘Khaled Abu Saleh was murdered 30 kilometers (22 miles) from Ubari.” Mohammed Saleh, who is described by AFP as the deputy chairman of the High Security Commission, said that “An armed gang traveling in five cars followed him after he registered with the electoral commission. They surrounded and killed him.” The Fruits of Imperialist War in Africa The situation in Libya represents the outcome of imperialist wars that have been waged by the U.S. and other Western countries over the last decade. Initiated on the basis of humanitarian concerns, these interventions always result in the worsening of conditions for the masses within the respective countries. In the U.S. itself, the economic crisis is causing the destruction of the cities and the rise in racist violence. The runaway military spending has not created any job growth for the tens of millions of unemployed workers. In Canada, which ostensibly led the NATO operations in Libya, a scandal is emerging over the cover-up of the cost of the war. Conservative government Defense Minister Peter MacKay took to the airwaves on May 13 in a damage control effort amid allegations of misrepresentation of funding in the war. Press reports say that the actual cost of the Libya bombing campaign for Canada was 700 percent higher than what has been stated publically. MacKay said “The interventions are expensive. In my view, this was money well spent.” Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire , an international electronic press service designed to foster intelligent discussion on the affairs of African people throughout the continent and the world. |
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Global Research Articles by Abayomi Azikiwe |
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Print this articleNYT Admits Lockerbie Case Flaws
Exclusive: Even in death, Libyan Ali al-Megrahi is dubbed “the Lockerbie bomber,” a depiction that proved useful last year in rallying public support for “regime change” in Libya. But the New York Times now concedes, belatedly, that the case against him was riddled with errors and false testimony, as Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
From the Now-They-Tell-Us department comes the New York Times obit of Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted by a special Scottish court for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. After Megrahi’s death from cancer was announced on Sunday, the Times finally acknowledged that his guilt was in serious doubt.
Last year, when the Times and other major U.S. news outlets were manufacturing public consent for a new war against another Middle East “bad guy,” i.e. Muammar Gaddafi, Megrahi’s guilt was treated as flat fact. Indeed, citation of the Lockerbie bombing became the debate closer, effectively silencing anyone who raised questions about U.S. involvement in another war for “regime change.”
Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi
After all, who would “defend” the monsters involved in blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans? Again and again, the U.S.-backed military intervention to oust Gaddafi in 2011 was justified by Gaddafi’s presumed authorship of the Lockerbie terrorist attack.
Only a few non-mainstream news outlets, like Consortiumnews.com, bothered to actually review the dubious evidence against Megrahi and raise questions about the judgment of the Scottish court that convicted Megrahi in 2001.
By contrast to those few skeptical articles, the New York Times stoked last year’s war fever by suppressing or ignoring those doubts. For instance, one March 2011 article out of Washington began by stating: “There once was no American institution more hostile to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s’s pariah government than the Central Intelligence Agency, which had lost its deputy Beirut station chief when Libyan intelligence operatives blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Scotland in 1988.”
Note the lack of doubt or even attribution. A similar certainty prevailed in virtually all other mainstream news reports and commentaries, ranging from the right-wing media to the liberal MSNBC, whose foreign policy correspondent Andrea Mitchell would seal the deal by recalling that Libya had accepted “responsibility” for the bombing.
Gaddafi’s eventual defeat, capture and grisly murder brought no fresh doubts about the certainty of the guilt of Megrahi, who was simply called the “Lockerbie bomber.” Few eyebrows were raised even when British authorities released Libya’s former intelligence chief Moussa Koussa after asking him some Lockerbie questions.
Scotland Yard also apparently failed to notice the dog not barking when the new pro-Western Libyan government took power and released no confirmation that Gaddafi’s government indeed had sponsored the 1988 attack. After Gaddafi’s overthrow and death, the Lockerbie issue just disappeared from the news.
A Surprising Obit
So, readers of the New York Times’ obituary page might have been surprised Monday if they read deep into Megrahi’s obit and discovered this summary of the case:
“The enigmatic Mr. Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist but defended by many Libyans, and even some world leaders, as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.”
If you read even further, you would find this more detailed examination of the evidence:
“Investigators, while they had no direct proof, believed that the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Flight 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.
“After a three-year investigation, Mr. Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted on mass murder charges in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion. …
“Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999: the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.
“The trial lasted 85 days. None of the witnesses connected the suspects directly to the bomb. But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing that forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified Mr. Megrahi as the buyer, although Mr. Gauci seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.
“The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.
“Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Mr. Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that Mr. Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase, and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.
“On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found Mr. Megrahi guilty but acquitted Mr. Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that ‘there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt’ of Mr. Megrahi.
“Much of the evidence was later challenged. It emerged that Mr. Gauci had repeatedly failed to identify Mr. Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his photograph in a magazine and being shown the same photo in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.
“Investigators said Mr. Bollier, whom even the court called ‘untruthful and unreliable,’ had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.
“In 2007, Mr. Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for residue of explosives, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.
“The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight was also cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.
“Hans Köchler, a United Nations observer, called the trial ‘a spectacular miscarriage of justice,’ words echoed by Mr. Mandela. Many legal experts and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Mr. Megrahi a scapegoat for a Libyan government long identified with terrorism. While denying involvement, Libya paid $2.7 billion to the victims’ families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation.”
Prosecutorial Misconduct
In other words, the case against Megrahi looks to have been an example of gross prosecutorial misconduct, relying on testimony from perjurers and failing to pursue promising leads (like the possibility that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, not transferred from plane to plane to plane, an unlikely route for a terrorist attack and made even more dubious by the absence of any evidence of an unaccompanied bag being put on those flights).
Also, objective journalists should have noted that Libya’s much-touted acceptance of “responsibility” was simply an effort to get punishing sanctions lifted and that Libya always continued to assert its innocence.
All of the above facts were known in 2011 when the Times and the rest of the mainstream U.S. press corps presented a dramatically different version to the American people. Last year, all these questions and doubts were suppressed in the name of rallying support for “regime change” in Libya.
On March 18, 2011, I wrote: “As Americans turn to their news media to make sense of the upheavals in the Middle East, it’s worth remembering that the bias of the mainstream U.S. press corps is most powerful when covering a Washington-designated villain, especially if he happens to be Muslim.
“In that case, all uncertainty about some aspect of his villainy is discarded. Evidence in serious dispute is stated as flat fact. Readers are expected to share this unquestioned belief about the story’s frame – and that usually helps manufacture consent behind some desired government action or policy.
“At such moments, it’s also hard to contest the conventional wisdom. To do so will guarantee that you’ll be treated as some kook or pariah. It won’t even matter if you’re vindicated in the long run. You’ll still be remembered as some weirdo who was out of step.
“And those who push the misguided consensus will mostly go on to bigger and better things, as people who have proved their worth even if they got it all wrong. Such is the way the national U.S. political/media system now works – or some might say doesn’t work.
“Perhaps the most costly recent example of this pattern was the Official Certainty about Iraq’s WMD in 2002-03. With only a few exceptions, the major U.S. news media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, bought into the Bush administration’s WMD propaganda, partly because Saddam Hussein was so unsavory that no one wanted to be dubbed a “Saddam apologist.’
“When Iraq’s WMD turned out to be a mirage, there was almost no accountability at senior levels of the U.S. news media. Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who repeatedly reported Iraq’s WMD as ‘flat fact,’ is still in the same job eight years later; Bill Keller, who penned an influential article called ’The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,’ got promoted to New York Times executive editor after the Iraq-WMD claims exploded leaving egg on the faces of him and his fellow club members.
“So, now as Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi reprises his old role as ‘mad dog of the Middle East,’ Americans are being prepped for another Middle East conflict by endlessly reading as flat fact that Libyan intelligence agents blew up Pan Am Flight 103 back in 1988.
“These articles never mention that there is strong doubt the Libyans had anything to do with the attack and that the 2001 conviction of Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi was falling apart in 2009 before he was released on humanitarian grounds, suffering from prostate cancer.
“Though it’s true that a Scottish court did convict Megrahi – while acquitting a second Libyan – the judgment appears to have been more a political compromise than an act of justice. One of the judges told Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about ‘enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction.’
“After the testimony of a key witness was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed in 2007 to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction out of a strong concern that it was a miscarriage of justice. However, again due to intense political pressure, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities agreed to release Megrahi on medical grounds.
“Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain an early release in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis, but that doesn’t mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his conviction.”
But today, the United States has anything but an objective press corps. That should be obvious when you contrast the U.S. media’s certitude about Megrahi’s guilt last year – when outrage over the Lockerbie bombing was crucial in lining up public acquiescence to another Middle East war – against the nuanced doubts noted in Megrahi’s New York Times obit on Monday.
[To read more of Robert Parry’s writings, you can now order his last two books, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, at the discount price of only $16 for both. For details on the special offer, click here.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
The Framing of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber
Not before time a detailed overview of the Lockerbie bomb case
When Muammar Ghadaffi made his peace with western imperialism and Tony Blair , part of the price was the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber. A special court had been convened at Camp Zeis in the Netherlands 8 years before, but only Scottish judges were to sit there, whereas the original Libyan demand had been for an international panel of judges.
Ghadaffi was eager to come in from the cold and conceded the point. The judges decided, when faced with 2 prisoners, to convict one and acquit the other. The pressures on them were, of course, enormous. Megrahi was convicted in January 2001 and freed, as a ‘humanitarian gesture’ in August 2009.
It is widely believed that the reason for Pan Am 103 being brought down had nothing whatsoever to do with Ghadaffi and everything to do with a pro-Syrian Palestinian group, the PFLP-General Command. The reason? An Iranian aircraft had been shot from the skies by the US navy some years previously.
And of course, whilst we have heard countless tales of how much the relatives of the Pan Am passengers have suffered, I have yet to see a single interview with the 300 or so Iranians who were murdered. Arab people are somehow not quite as human for the BBC as white Americans.
The evidence was always extremely tenuous and depended on things like the bomb having been put on a flight in Malta and then relying on it to go undetected. Far more likely, the bomb was put on in Paris. But the judges were under political pressure to come up with a result and that is what they did, aided by CIA and British Police skullduggery and the planting of evidence, the disappearance of other evidence and the paying of bribes to witnesses.
When Megrahi was freed in August 2009 one of the conditions, although Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill denies that he gave him this advice, was that he had to drop his appeal. The evidence had all but disappeared as the true story of how Megrahi was framed began coming out. An appeal hearing when the judges were forced to admit that the evidence was simply not credible or sufficient would have been a damaging blow. Far better to release Megrahi on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, even if the largely stupid and ignorant American relatives were outraged, because they preferred to take the word of Bush and the Republicans rather than examine the convictions themselves. Many of the British relatives were not so easily taken in, in particular Jim Swire whose daughter died in the atrocity.
As Mick Hall writes, ‘below Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee has put together a detailed overview of the Lockerbie case. It was commissioned by the Scottish Review, and is designed to unpick the many strands of the case past and present. This is the first time, a concise statement justifying the argument that the Lockerbie trial resulted in a colossal miscarriage of justice has been placed in the public arena.’
Tony Greenstein
What was Abdelbaset al-Megrahi supposed to have done?
The court decided that he was a senior Libyan security officer who had bought a selection of clothes in a small shop in Sliema, Malta, only three miles from Luqa airport. Fragments of clothes from that shop were recovered from the crash scene, and the shopkeeper (Tony Gauci) remembered the sale. Megrahi then (allegedly) smuggled a suitcase containing these clothes and a Semtex bomb disguised in a radio-cassette recorder on to Air Malta flight KM180, which left Luqa at 09.45 local time on 21st December, for Frankfurt. The suitcase was said to be unaccompanied, and to carry Air Malta tags directing it to be transferred at Frankfurt to PA103A, and then at Heathrow to PA103. He was alleged to have used an electronic countdown timer set to detonate the bomb after the transatlantic leg had left Heathrow.
What was the evidence for this?
Evidence against Megrahi fell under a number of headings.
1. A member of the Libyan security services who had turned CIA informer identified him as a senior security operative.
2. Tony Gauci identified him as 'resembling' the man who bought the clothes in his shop.
3. He was shown to have been at Luqa airport at the time KM180 departed, travelling on a false passport.
4. Baggage transfer records at Frankfurt showed evidence of an item of luggage being transferred from KM180 to PA103A, even though no passenger from the Malta flight was booked on the Heathrow flight, and all the passengers collected their luggage at their destinations with nothing going astray.
A small piece of printed circuit board found embedded in a scrap of the Maltese clothes was identified as a part of a countdown timer made by a Swiss firm which Megrahi had had business dealings with. This timer was part of a special order of only 20 items supplied exclusively to Libya.
The difficulty with this is firstly that each of these points fails to stand up to serious scrutiny, and secondly that far more robust evidence exists for both a different modus operandi and a different set of perpetrators.
Membership of the Libyan security services
The CIA informant, Majid Giaka, was originally the Crown's star witness. Without his evidence, the indictments against Megrahi and his colleague Lamin Fhimah (who was acquitted) could not have been issued in the first place. However, CIA cables revealed during the trial exposed Giaka as a fantasist who was inventing 'intelligence' for favours and money from the CIA. The judges discounted all his evidence except for his statement that Megrahi was a member of the Libyan security forces. No other evidence for this was produced, and Megrahi has consistently denied the allegation. No evidence has ever emerged linking Megrahi to any other terrorist atrocities or human rights abuses of the Gaddafi regime, or to refute his claim that he was merely an airline employee who was also moonlighting as an entrepreneur businessman.
The identification evidence Tony Gauci was first interviewed about the clothes sale on 1st September 1989, nine months after the event. He described the purchaser as Libyan, aged about 50, over six feet tall, heavily built and dark-skinned. Megrahi is 5 feet 8 inches tall, light-skinned, of medium build, and was 36 at the time of the purchase. A photofit and an artist’s impression produced at the time suggest the man may have been negro or mixed race. Gauci was unsure of the date, but this was narrowed down to either 23rd November or 7th December 1988 on the basis of televised football games. Gauci stated that the Christmas lights were not yet lit, and it was raining when the customer left the shop.
On 15th February 1991 (well over two years after the purchase) Gauci was shown a police photospread including a picture of Megrahi. He initially rejected all the men as being 'too young', but when urged to reconsider he chose Megrahi's picture as the one that looked most like the customer. However, all the policemen present knew which picture was the suspect's, a recognised confounder in such exercises and something now banned, and Megrahi's picture was appreciably different from the others in both size and quality. As a further confounder the passport photo reproduction used was such a poor likeness of Megrahi as to be essentially unrecognisable. It did, however, look a bit like the photofit Gauci had produced in 1989.
By the time of the live identity parade in April 1999, better likenesses identifying Megrahi as the 'Lockerbie bomber' had appeared in many publications, which Gauci is known to have seen. (So widespread had been the publicity that most people following the case could probably have picked the accused out without ever having met him.) Megrahi was by then 47, close to the age the purchaser was said to be in 1988. The 'foils' in the parade were nearly all much younger (and bore little resemblance to Megrahi), even though by Gauci's original estimate the purchaser would by then have been in his early sixties. Megrahi in the flesh looked nothing like the images Gauci had produced for the police in 1989, or the blurry passport photo he picked out in 1991. Nevertheless, Gauci once again fingered him as 'resembling' the purchaser.
The date of the purchase was important, as Megrahi was in Malta on 7th December 1988 (using his own passport), but not on 23rd November. Meteorological evidence demonstrated that there was light rain in Sliema at the relevant time on 23rd November, but not on 7th December. The Christmas lights were eventually found to have been switched on on 6th December.
In late 1998 a magazine article was published with a recognisable photograph of Megrahi, together with a list of all the discrepancies between Gauci's original description of the purchaser and date, and the case against Megrahi. Gauci had a copy which was only taken from him four days before the identity parade. When he gave evidence, he consistently back-tracked on his original statements regarding height, build, age, Christmas lights and rain, always to favour the prosecution case. Tony Gauci's brother Paul, who was later rewarded for 'maintaining the resolve of his brother', had long expressed interest in a reward for the family's input, and after Megrahi was convicted the brothers were paid an alleged $3 million by the US Department of Justice's 'Rewards for Justice' programme.
Presence at Luqa airport
Megrahi was at Luqa airport on the morning of the disaster, using a passport in the name of 'Abdusamad'. However, all he did was catch his flight for Tripoli, without going airside, and without checking in any hold luggage. The court accepted that he could not have got the bomb suitcase on to KM180 himself, and must have had an accomplice. That accomplice was originally said to have been Lamin Fhimah, but Fhimah could not even be shown to have been at the airport that morning. The 'false' passport was a legal one, issued to Megrahi to allow him to conceal his airline employment while negotiating business deals to circumvent the sanctions then in force against Libya, and which he occasionally used for personal travel. Although Megrahi used it for that trip, he had business meetings in Malta using his own name, and stayed at a hotel where he was well known.
Not only was no other accomplice identified, security at Luqa airport was unusually tight in 1988, and baggage records provided strong evidence that there was no unaccompanied luggage on flight KM180. Despite intensive and intrusive investigation lasting many months, no plausible mechanism whereby the bomb suitcase could have been loaded was ever identified, and no trace of the bomb was found on the island.
Baggage transfer at Frankfurt
The only evidence for an unaccompanied suitcase coming from Malta was a single line of code in a printout taken from the Frankfurt airport automated baggage system, which surfaced in August 1989. However, that system was far from transparent, and a number of guesses and assumptions were necessary to conclude that something might have been transferred from KM180 to PA103A. In the end, two items apparently loaded on to the Heathrow flight could not be identified, one seeming to have come from Malta and one from Warsaw. The coincidence of the Maltese clothes caused the investigators to become convinced the former item was the bomb, and this was never reconsidered despite the failure to find any way the bomb could have been put on board at Luqa. The Warsaw-origin item was never investigated.
The timer fragment.
This is the most notorious item in the Lockerbie case. Originally the investigators believed the bomb to have been triggered by an altimeter device, operating on air pressure, and designed not to explode until the device was airborne (see the PFLP-GC, below). This introduced problems in respect of a Frankfurt introduction, as such a device should have exploded over France. A hypothesis was developed that the altimeter had malfunctioned on the feeder flight, only to detonate after the second take-off. When the focus of the investigation switched to Malta and a third flight, this introduced a paradox that was not addressed for over a year, until the identification of this fragment as part of a countdown timer resolved the difficulty.
The MST-13 timer was said to be one of a special run of only 20 supplied exclusively to Libya by the Swiss firm MEBO. Megrahi had business dealings with that firm, but not relating to, or at the time of, the purchase of the timers. Nevertheless this was said to be the 'golden thread' linking him to the bomb. This item had extraordinarily irregular provenance within the forensic investigation, with paperwork anomalies leading many commentators to suspect its appearance in the chain of evidence had been back-dated. In addition, the Libyan provenance was less certain than claimed, with Lockerbie occurring over two years after the timers were supplied, and examples having been found in other parts of Africa.
Irrespective of who had bombed the plane, the countdown timer introduced another paradox. Maid of the Seas exploded only 38 minutes after her wheels left the tarmac, and the plane was not late. There was a seven-hour flight ahead of her, with a thousand miles of Atlantic ocean where incriminating clothes and PCB fragments could have been buried forever. An altimeter timer would inevitably have exploded around 40 minutes into the flight, regardless of take-off time. Using a countdown timer set so early in the flight time carried a huge risk that the explosion would have occurred harmlessly on the tarmac if the plane had missed its slot at Heathrow – as could easily have happened on a stormy winter evening.
It was only in February 2012 that metallurgical evidence concealed from the original trial was revealed, which showed that the fragment could not have been one of the 20 items MEBO had supplied to Libya. This discovery calls into question whether the PCB chip was even part of a countdown timer, rather than some other electronic component using the same basic template.
Evidence for a Heathrow introduction
Although Maid of the Seas was loaded from empty at Heathrow, a press release issued on 30th December 1988 announced that the bomb had almost certainly not been introduced there, apparently because the location of the explosion had been traced to the baggage container holding the Frankfurt luggage. However, that container already held a number of suitcases before the Frankfurt items were added, and had been unattended in Terminal 3 for some time during the afternoon.
Baggage-handler JohnBedford was interviewed on 3rd January 1989, and told a strange story. He had left the container with a few suitcases already inside while he took a tea break. When he returned (this was still an hour before the feeder flight landed), he noticed two more cases had been added. He described the left-hand one, which was only a few inches from the position of the explosion, as 'a maroony-brown hardshell, the kind Samsonite make'. It was not until several weeks later that forensic analysis identified the bomb suitcase as a Samsonite hardshell in 'antique copper', variously described by investigators as brown, bronze, maroon and even burgundy. It was known that security at Heathrow was very lax, with many airside passes unaccounted-for. However, there is no evidence the police seriously investigated the possibility that the suitcase Bedford saw was the bomb-bag.
Reasons why this suitcase was not the bomb varied during the inquiry.
Originally (at the 1991 fatal accident inquiry) it was assumed absolutely that the case could not have been moved at all, thus as the explosion had occurred a few inches outside its last recorded position, it was innocent. Later (at Camp Zeist) this was reversed, and a suitcase from Frankfurt was placed in the position the Bedford case had originally occupied. One might think this obviously allowed for the possibility, even probability, that the Bedford case, replaced on top of this Frankfurt item, was indeed the bomb. Especially as no innocent suitcase recovered on the ground was ever matched to the one Bedford described. Nevertheless the prosecution insisted that the tenuous trail of the Frankfurt baggage printout was the one to follow, rather than the only brown Samsonite suitcase actually seen by any witness.
It was only after Megrahi had been convicted that another witness came forward to testify that there had been a break-in into that very area of the Heathrow airside, the night before the disaster. This had been reported at the time, but not acted on. Clearly, this could have been the way the suitcase was taken airside, to allow the terrorist to enter the next day, apparently empty-handed. It was not until 2007 that it was realised that one witness whose evidence had been crucial both at the FAI and the civil actions against Pan Am in the USA in the early 1990s had not been called at Camp Zeist. DC Derek Henderson had conducted reconciliations on the baggage carried by passengers on PA103, and concluded that none of them had checked in a brown-ish Samsonite. This was considered crucial in proving that the bomb had not been planted in a passenger's luggage. However, it also proved that the suitcase Bedford saw was not legitimate passenger baggage. Lacking his evidence, the Zeist judges were able to decide that Bedford's case belonged to a passenger, and had simply vanished over Lockerbie.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command
The saga of the Frankfurt cell of this terrorist group, its murderous members, their shocking past form in blowing up airliners, their possession of explosives, radio-cassette recorders and altimeter-type timers, and their serious intent to blow up an airliner in autumn 1988, has been well-rehearsed elsewhere. There is evidence to suggest they were sponsored by Iran to take revenge for the US shooting down of the Iranian airbus flight IR655 over the Straits of Hormuz in July 1988. What there was not, was any evidence to link this group to the actual placing of a device on Pan Am 103. Whether this is because the investigators spent all their time and effort investigating the feeder flight, and latterly concentrating exclusively on Malta, and neglected to investigate Heathrow as a possible point of origin, cannot be known.
The reasoning of the Zeist court
The trial at Camp Zeist took place nine years after the indictments were issued against Megrahi and Fhimah. Nine years of international publicity and condemnation, of house arrest for the suspects, and punitive sanctions imposed on Libya, which was assumed to be guilty. It is difficult to see how the presumption of innocence could be maintained in this context. The reasoning of the judges has been subject to much criticism as being perverse; 'inference piled upon supposition'. At almost every turn a less probable explanation that implied guilt was preferred to a more probable explanation that implied innocence.
The rationale of the judgement has been variously described as circular reasoning, petitio principii and begging the question. First, the judges decided for no readily apparent reason that the date of the clothes purchase was 7th December,despite the evidence of the rainfall records. Then, they decided that although Gauci's identification of Megrahi was 'only partial', the fact that Megrahi had been in Malta on the day of the purchase, and had been at the airport at the time they had decided the bomb was invisibly levitated on board KM180, and knew the manufacturer of the timing devices, showed that he was indeed the purchaser beyond reasonable doubt. Then, when turning to the extraordinarily tenuous evidence at Frankfurt, the possibility that the entry being relied on was a mere coding anomaly was rejected on the grounds that the man they had decided had bought the clothes in the suitcase was at the airport when the flight in question had left.
Although Giaka was acknowledged as a lying fantasist his assertion that Megrahi was a senior security operative was accepted, and the 'coded' diplomatic Abdusamad passport judged to be highly incriminating. Megrahi having lied to a journalist in a panicked interview shortly after being indicted was also held against him. The extensive terrorist record of the PFLP-GC members was brushed aside in favour of blaming a man who had no such history, and their possession of radio-cassette bombs designed to attack aircraft ignored in favour of an imaginary device that Megrahi was merely assumed to have assembled.
Withholding of evidence
Inquiries carried out in connection with Megrahi's appeals revealed an alarming amount of important evidence never disclosed to the defence. These are only a selection.
• The report of the break-in at Heathrow the night before the disaster
• DC Henderson’s baggage reconciliation report (despite his having given evidence at the FAI and in the USA in the 1990s)
• A statement from Gauci stating that the clothes purchase occurred on 29th November
• Police notes documenting the desire of the Gauci brothers for a reward payment
• The metallurgy results showing the coating on the 'timer' fragment was pure tin, while all the timers made for MEBO were coated with a tin-lead alloy
• The infamous 'public interest immunity' documents relating to the timer fragment
It seems inescapable that if the Zeist court had had access to the withheld evidence, their reasoning might well have been different.
Conclusion
The weight of evidence that the Lockerbie bomb was introduced at Heathrow (not all of which can be rehearsed here) is absolutely compelling. In contrast the evidence that the bomb transited from Malta through Frankfurt is beyond tenuous. In addition, no dispassionate examination of Tony Gauci's various and varied statements can possibly lead to the conclusion that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi bought the clothes in the bomb suitcase. Bearing in mind that Megrahi was verifiably in Tripoli at 4pm on 21st December 1988, the time John Bedford took his tea break, some might reasonably observe that he has an alibi. It was his misfortune to be at the other end of the blind alley the investigators pursued to Malta, looking just suspicious enough and with the right contacts to have a wholly inferential case constructed against him.
Morag Kerr writes on behalf of the Justice for Megrahi Committee.
The above document was commissioned by, and first published on the Scottish Review.
Sunday, 20 May 2012
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi – Also a Victim of the Lockerbie Bombing
It was always obvious that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was an innocent victim, a scapegoat, for the bombing of the Lockerbie Pan-Am flight 103. As Peter Meyer writes in ‘The Lockerbie Bombing, and the U.S.S. Vincennes:
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| Dr Jim Swire with the book that proves the cover-up |
‘In July 1988 the US Navy battle cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. It was, of course, claimed by the US Navy that this was "an accident". Sure. Just one of those little mistakes that happen from time to time. And pigs can fly.
In
December 1988 a bomb exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland, killing all 270 people on board, including 189 Americans. It
is widely believed that the attack was carried out in retaliation for
the destruction of the Iranian airliner, specifically, that Iran (and
possibly other Middle Eastern states) paid a Palestinian group (the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command) to do
the deed.’ It should be noted that no-one was ever brought to trial, still less convicted, over the murder of 290 Iranians. Unlike Americans, Iranians are lesser beings, not fully human. That is the explicit racism of those who, for over 20 years, have barely mentioned the original crime that led to the crime of Lockerbie.
It was less than a month ago that I blogged on the framing of Al-Megrahi. This had knawed away at me for years, the blatant fixing of a trial, with the willing complicity of the Scottish judiciary and legal establishment.
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| Jim Swire at the funeral of his beloved Flora - Tragedy didn't impede his humanity |
That the US Government and its various intelligence agencies, not least the CIA, have been actively involved in a cover up, to the extent of threatening anyone who threatened to expose it, cannot be doubted. See US Government Still on Ropes Over Lockerbie by John Ashton, a former US Marine and Republican, whose business was destroyed by US government agencies because he went after the truth, which originally appeared on June 9, 1996 in The Mail on Sunday.
Hilary Clinton had, almost up to the time that al-Megrahi died, demanded his deportation to the USA. But then US politicians are used to framing innocent people and executing them.
In a new book by John Ashton new material is revealed which destroyes the shaky conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. ‘Lockerbie relatives urge inquiry into 'suppressed evidence'
Claiming there was an “industrial-level failure to disclose”, Ashton said the new material, which was not given to the defence or at the trial, included:
• documentary evidence that scientists at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment, now part of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, discovered there were key differences in the metal coatings used in a timer fragment allegedly used in Lockerbie and a control sample from the type supplied to the Libyans. One used a coating made wholly of tin; the control sample used a tin/lead alloy.
• evidence that the timer fragment had several differences from the Swiss-built devices sold to Gaddafi's regime, including the type of circuit board it used.
• that Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who claimed Megrahi had bought clothes allegedly used in the bombing from his shop, was offered a US reward of $2m or more, while Gauci's brother Paul could have received $1m, with the help of Dumfries and Galloway police.
• that Gauci met Scottish detectives as many as 50 times while the prosecution case was being prepared; while making 23 formal statements. Four of the statements were not disclosed.
Gauci repeatedly changed his account, including identifying people who looked like known Middle Eastern terrorists and giving different dates on which the clothes were bought, seriously undermining the prosecution case against Megrahi.
He said:
‘If the prosecution was right, he carried out the attack at times using his own passport, stayed in his regular hotel, bought the clothes in a small shop rather than a large one, used normal scheduled flights to and from Malta, planted the bomb on two feeder flights before Pan Am 103, and used a timer the Libyans believed was exclusively made for them.’A Crown Office spokesperson refused to comment on the book's allegations or Swire's remarks to avoid prejudicing its ongoing enquiries. The Crown Office and Dumfries and Galloway is expecting to send investigators to Tripoli in an attempt to uncover any fresh evidence about Libya's involvement in the bombing.
“It is a live investigation,” the Crown Office spokesperson said. “Lockerbie remains an open case concerning the involvement of others with Megrahi in the murder of 270 people.” Precisely. The only investigation is into ‘the involvement of others’ with Megrahi not into whether Megrahi was involved at all.
The death of al-Megrahi may yet bring the truth nearer. It is of course no accident that posh boy Cameron should today, despite the evidence to the contrary, say that the release of Megrahi in 2009 was a ‘mistake’. One wouldn’t expect a Prime Minister of the calibre (not) of Cameron to do anything other than echo the establishment’s determination not to let the truth out.
Tribute should be paid to the British families of the those who died, above all the courageous Dr Jim Swire, whose beloved daughter Flora, was killed on the Pan Am flight. He has fought tenaciously for the truth to come out despite scurrilous villification from the likes of the vindictive and spiteful Susan Cohen, whose only wish was that al-Megrahi’s death should be painful. Such is the nature of the creatures that the US political system throws up.
If you want to have a full taste of the stupidity and viciousness of the American families, whose brains don’t extend to challenging their own government story, then this is a good example from CNN. I have posted a number of comments on the CNN site and I have now been moderated in the land of the free!! They don’t like it up ‘em!
Tony Greenstein
Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi
I first saw Baset al-Megrahi on the morning of 1st of May 2000. He was below us in the well of the specially convened trial court at Kamp Zeist, Holland. With me were Reverend John Mosey and other friends. Close to us, to one side of the public gallery, sat his wife Aisha and his family.
Looking through the bullet proof glass towards Baset in the dock he seemed timid, never venturing to speak out for himself. Later we learned that his defence team had told him that he was not to speak in court, but to let them do all the talking on his behalf.
We were totally unprepared for the comment from another observer in the gallery:- "How could you sit so near to the filth?" he said.
This was presumably naked racism, coupled to a profound a priori presumption of guilt unencumbered by the inconvenience of having to prove it. Similar hatred has festered for some, and contributed to the blinding of many ever since.
Separation from his family was the cruellest consequence of Baset’s conviction. He loved them dearly, as they did him. His wife the gentle Aisha was almost always present whenever I met her husband once he was out of prison, and on licence in Tripoli, though unlike her husband, she had no English, any more than I had any Arabic. Her demeanour revealed her love for him and her trust towards me an outsider who had seen through the miscarriage of justice. Only near the very end did she leave us alone together, holding hands, for speech was difficult.
On my first actually meeting Baset in Greenock prison, he was calm but determined to clear his name. He must have known that we had campaigned for years to have him tried under Scots law. Yet there was not a word of complaint, though his cancer, already giving him pain on sitting, was then in evidence.
A devout Muslim, he had a Christmas card from the prison shop ready for me, on it he had written ‘Dr Swire and family, please pray for me and my family’.
I treasure it. It resoundingly trumps the arrogance of the comment from Zeist, quoted above. It drains the poison from it.
Baset’s excellent mastery of English, and his good natured but wholehearted support for certain Scottish football teams, made him popular with the other prisoners almost all who met him, both at Greenock and at Barlinnie, came to believe him innocent. Meeting him, with his calm and intelligent summing up of his predicament spoke of determination to ensure that the world should learn that the verdict was unjust.
At least before he died we learned what he already knew: that the whole story that a Libyan bomb using a long running timer had started its journey from Malta was not a fable, but a myth*. The famed timer fragment ‘PT35b’ could never have been part of one of the Libyan timers allegedly used. There is now no valid evidence left from the court that either Malta, her flag carrier airline, or Baset’s own country were involved. Baset has a valid alibi: he was in Malta that day! He died knowing that in the end the truth will emerge.
On release from prison, his valedictory letter to Scotland made clear that he attached no blame to her people for what had happened to him. This from a man wrongly segregated from his family for years, and in the grip of a terrible disease, tells us much about the nature of Baset al-Megrahi. No one can be sure how much the stress of his terrible predicament affected his immune system and thus contributed to the development of his fatal disease.
Later, when I met him in Tripoli he was concerned that I as a victim’s father should get access, on his death, to all the information that had been amassed to fight his abandoned appeal. He knew that I still grieved for my daughter and sought the truth as to who had really murdered her. On the brink of his own death, he found the spirit to empathise with me. That was a measure of this man.
It is a tragedy that we have failed to overturn the verdict while he was still alive. But we must clear his name posthumously for the sake of truth and justice and for the future peace of Baset’s family. If we do nothing then a great evil will have triumphed. Perhaps those few Westerners who came to know him much better than I did will speak up for him now.
Baset was an intelligent member of an alien culture who I came to respect for his dignity, humanity and frankness. I am proud to have known him.
In our culture there are also those who, blinding themselves to the profound failure of the evidence against Baset, have deliberately tried to suppress the truth, and even to deny that Baset was mortally sick. Some of them have clearly done it knowing what they were doing. Some seem actually to have been paid to do it. One can only pray for them.
Others, understandably consumed by hatred against a man they genuinely believed had murdered their relatives advocated the withholding of treatment, even of painkillers so that he might die as quickly as possible and in the utmost agony.
I believe that such personal reactions are profoundly destructive to those who hold them. Unwittingly they have allowed themselves to become victims of the very terrorism which they rightly loathe; as such they will need help when the truth does come out.
Therein will lie a number of individual further tragedies.
Jim Swire
(20th May 2012),
--
“They have succeeded in dominating us more
through ignorance, than through force”.
Simon Bolivar
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" - Steve Biko