On to that second conspiracy theory. According to Mr Linklater\u2019s Times column of 13 August 2012, we allege a huge plot to shift the blame from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya, which involved: \u2018the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that<\/em> [my italics].\u2019<\/p>\n The last sentence is key. It suggests that we claim that everyone from the police to the judges plotted with government and intelligence services to protect the likely bombers and convict those whom they knew to be innocent. The trouble is neither I, nor the great majority of Mr Megrahi\u2019s supporters, have ever made such a claim. In his Scottish Review article Mr Linklater quotes the following passage of my book Megrahi: You are my Jury<\/em>, which, I believe, clearly does not posit a mega conspiracy: \u2018The police cannot be blamed for following leads that fell into their laps. Together with the Crown, they stitched together a flimsy case based around a mercenary double agent, a highly unreliable identification, a hopeless CIA informant, some highly equivocal documents and overstated forensic conclusions, but, again, they were only doing their jobs.\u2019<\/p>\n My latest book, Scotland\u2019s Shame<\/em>, sets out my view more explicitly:<\/p>\n \u2018Let us be clear, there was no grand conspiracy by the intelligence services, senior politicians, police officers, prosecutors and judges to subvert the Lockerbie investigation and frame Megrahi and Libya. Conspiracies, of course, do sometimes happen, but seldom ones involving so many diverse parties.<\/p>\n There is, however, no doubt that important evidence was suppressed, that US intelligence agents interfered with the crash site and that some of the evidence against Megrahi was highly dubious. It can also be reasonably argued that the case against Libya was concocted in order to serve the agenda of the government of US president George H. W. Bush, who came to power less than a month after the bombing. In all these things the Scottish authorities were, very likely, no more than unwitting accomplices.\u2019<\/p>\n To be clear, I believe that two different things happened: firstly, the US government ensured that blame was from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya; secondly, the Scottish criminal justice system screwed up massively. The first I consider likely, but unproven, the second I consider a cert. Both are based upon a rational evaluation of the available facts. I do not believe that the second occurred because the Americans told the Scots to exonerate the real culprits and frame innocents, indeed I find such suggestions fanciful. In an email to me, Mr Linklater wrote: \u2018I’ve been in the [journalism] business for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof.\u2019 Yet he has failed to produce any evidence that the majority of Mr Megrahi\u2019s supporters have posited a grand conspiracy. The Justice for Megrahi campaign committee have formally alleged that some of the failures might have involved criminal conduct by certain Crown servants. They do not, however, claim that it happened at the behest of governments and intelligence services.<\/p>\n There was a clear motive for the US government to shift the blame from Iran to Libya. The Reagan administration was mired in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. As a number of journalists have documented, most notably the scholarly Robert Parry, Reagan\u2019s successor, George Bush Snr, who took office within a month of Lockerbie, spent his entire presidency trying to dodge the tide of scandal. Like Reagan, he was also preoccupied with the fate of US hostages held in Lebanon. If Iran was not appeased, it had the power to severely damage his presidency. Libya, by contrast, had no leverage over the US, moreover, toppling Gaddafi had been a White House obsession throughout the 1980s. As another great American journalist, Bob Woodward, revealed, CIA director William Casey launched one of the biggest covert programmes in the agency\u2019s history, with the clear aim of toppling Gaddafi. Disinformation \u2013 that is lying and fakery \u2013 was at its core, furthermore it had a number of key personnel in common with the Iran-Contra operation.<\/p>\n Defenders of Megrahi\u2019s conviction assert that the key breakthroughs in the investigation emerged through old-fashioned detective work. However, behind the scenes, the CIA played a key role. One of the Crown\u2019s main witnesses, Majid Giaka, was a CIA asset, while another, Mebo boss Edwin Bollier provided information to the Swiss police at the behest of the CIA. According to his main client, that most diligent of Iron Curtain intelligence agencies, the Stasi, he was almost certainly a western intelligence mole. At Megrahi\u2019s trial it emerged that the CIA had had one of the Mebo timers for two years prior to Lockerbie and we subsequently learned that the agency knew months before the bombing that the devices had been made by Mebo and supplied to Libya. It was the CIA who matched the circuit board fragment to the timers, while trying to conceal its own role in the \u2018discovery\u2019 by insisting that an FBI forensic expert take credit for it. There is a cloud of evidential anomalies hanging over the fragment\u2019s provenance. In view of the fact that it was not, as we now know, from one of the 20 timers supplied by Bollier to Libya, is it really far-fetched to suggest that the CIA planted a fake fragment in order to conclusively link Libya to the bombing? According to the head of the FBI investigation, Richard Marquise, his Swiss counterpart believed the fragment was a plant, yet he was not derided as a crazy conspiracy theorist, indeed Marquise acknowledged that the same though also crossed his mind.<\/p>\n It was supposedly months of old-fashioned detective work that revealed that the bomb had come from Malta, via Frankfurt. Yet US diplomatic security officer Fred Burton let slip that the CIA told him within 10 days of the bombing that the bomb had come from Malta, which again raises the suspicion that the agency predetermined the investigation\u2019s outcome.<\/p>\n I have spent many months doing my own old-fashioned detective work among the mountain rescue volunteers, police officers and military personnel who searched the crash site. Among them were rescue team members who recounted seeing American officials in Lockerbie within two hours of the crash, at around 9 pm. The team leader recalled that some of the officials had gathered in a room in the police station, where they were studying maps. A helicopter pilot told me how he ferried around the crash site two CIA agents who conducted their own searches unsupervised by the Scottish police. Officially no Americans reached town before 11pm and the authorities have always denied that there was American interference at the site. They have also denied that large quantities of drugs or cash were found, yet I have spoken to a local man who found drugs and have a precognition statement by one who was present when drugs were recovered. I have also spoken to people who found large bundles of dollars. There may well be innocent explanations for these events, in which case the authorities should tell us what they are, rather than denying that they happened. And, instead of writing me off as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps Mr Linklater should get out and do some door knocking of his own.<\/p>\n The core of his argument is that we have dismissed hard evidence in favour of speculation, yet our chief concern is not the suspicion that blame was shifted. Rather, it is that the evidence that convicted Mr Megrahi was anything but hard, and that the hard evidence that should have acquitted him was withheld. Our case is built on facts, not speculation – these facts in particular:<\/p>\n The revelations prompted Fhimah\u2019s leading counsel, Richard Keen QC, to comment: \u2018Some of the material which is now disclosed goes to the very heart of material aspects of this case, not just to issues of credibility and reliability, but beyond. I frankly find it inconceivable that it could have been thought otherwise.\u2019 The SCCRC noted that Mr Boyd\u2019s assurance to the court was \u2018difficult to understand\u2019, adding: \u2018The matter is all the more serious given that part of the reason for [the prosecutors] viewing the cables on 1 June, 2000, was precisely in order to assess whether information behind the redacted sections reflected upon Majid\u2019s credibility.\u2019 (For more on this subject see my earlier article<\/a> for the Scottish Review.)<\/p>\n 4. The Crown Office allowed the police to obtain a $2 million reward for the most important prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, despite the payment of such rewards being against its own rules (a subject on which I have also written<\/a> for the Scottish Review).<\/p>\n 5. The Crown withheld the results of forensic tests, which had been supervised by the chief prosecution forensic scientist, that directly contradicted his crucial assertion that the timer fragment was \u2018similar in all respects\u2019 to the boards used in the timers supplied to Libya.<\/p>\n 6. Despite being under a legal obligation to investigate all leads, not only those that point to Libya, the police and Crown Office have failed to interview witnesses who can attest to the fact that the fragment could not have originated from the Libyan timers.<\/p>\n 7. When, in 2012, the committee of Justice for Megrahi submitted a summary of their allegations of criminal misconduct in confidence to the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill and invited him to appoint an independent investigator to consider them, MacAskill instead passed them to the Crown Office and told them to take the allegations to the police, even though Crown Office officials and police officers were named in the allegations. Despite having seen neither the detailed allegations, nor the supporting evidence, the Crown Office immediately declared publicly that they were \u2018without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded\u2019 and that the committee had been \u2018deliberately misleading\u2019, ie were liars.<\/p>\n These are all facts, not opinions or theories. I believe that they add up to the greatest scandal in Scotland\u2019s post-devolution era. Mr Linklater fails to acknowledge most of them and the rest he brushes over lightly. It isn\u2019t as if there are no precedents for the criminal justice system behaving extremely badly. The 15-year debacle of the Shirley McKie case tells us all we need to know about its capacity for denial and distortion of the truth.<\/p>\n The Crown Office\u2019s response to the Justice for Megrahi committee\u2019s allegations is especially disturbing. The allegations remain unproven and their subjects are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but they were made in good faith by people of intelligence and integrity, among them a former police superintendent, the former parish priest of Lockerbie and the father of one of the Lockerbie victims. The recently retired former chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway police, Patrick Shearer, appeared to be taking the allegations seriously, but the Crown Office\u2019s petulant and partisan response ruled out from the start any prospect of prosecutions.<\/p>\n In two previous articles on the case, published in The Times on 13 August 2012 and 4 October 2013, Mr Linklater failed even to acknowledge that the SCCRC had referred Megrahi\u2019s conviction to the appeal court, let alone that it had done so on six grounds. Only after I had taken him to task in an as yet unanswered open letter<\/a> did he acknowledge this fact. However, rather than engaging with the SCCRC report\u2019s awkward contents, he has used it to mow down his straw men of conspiracy nuts. In a Times article on 21 December he claimed that the report \u2018triumphantly vindicates\u2019 the justice system. This is like suggesting that the emergency services who save lives at a train crash are a triumphant vindication of rail safety.<\/p>\n He asserts that the SCCRC disposes of most of our \u2018cherished theories\u2019 in particular claims that evidence had been manipulated by the police. These allegations emanated not from Mr Megrahi\u2019s supporters, but from a former police officer known as the Golfer. Mr Linklater is not the first one to highlight the weaknesses in the Golfer\u2019s evidence. Two years ago another journalist wrote that his accounts were \u2018erratic, often inconsistent and sometimes contradictory.\u2019 That journalist was me. Strange, then, that Mr Linklater should have inferred that I cherish the Golfer\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n He accuses us of rejecting parts of the report that don\u2019t suit us, when we in fact accept most of them. But if, as we believe, the report is a curate\u2019s egg, are we not entitled to say so? Parts of it are demonstrably poor, for example, the commission conducted a lengthy review of the evidence concerning the timer fragment, yet failed to uncover the crucially important fact \u2013 based upon the evidence of Crown witnesses \u2013 that it could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers. Its investigation of events at the crash site was very limited and it failed to interview any of the civilian and military witness who attest to the events and finds that I have described above. The enquiry team failed to follow up Robert Baer\u2019s claims with anyone except the police and MI5, neither of whom, I would suggest, was motivated to give them any credibility. (The commission did not conclude, as Mr Linklater implies, that Baer was not to be trusted, rather it noted that it had no reason to doubt his credibility. Despite what Mr Linklater suggests, no one, least of all Baer, has ever claimed that he had direct knowledge of the information he relayed.)<\/p>\n It is not only Mr Linklater\u2019s \u2018conspiracy theorists\u2019 who don\u2019t accept all the SCCRC\u2019s findings: neither did the lawyers who led Megrahi\u2019s second appeal (which, sadly, he felt compelled to abandon in order to secure compassionate release). They also contended that there were serious failings in the conduct of his defence and that the defence team was mistaken in not leading certain evidence in relation to, inter alia, the PFLP-GC, Heathrow airport and Tony Gauci. I am not a lawyer and therefore make no judgement on the defence team, who have vigourously contested these claims. But to imply, as Mr Linklater does, that it is a matter of uncontested fact that they properly evaluated all the evidence is simply misleading.<\/p>\n Mr Linklater is apparently oblivious to the contradictions in his own arguments, with occasionally hilarious consequences. For example, having dismissed my summary of the police investigation as \u2018little more than a caricature\u2019, he delivers this cartoon-like portrait of his antagonists: \u2018Once seized with the virus of suspicion, nothing in the way of fact or reason will deter those who are determined to prove their case.\u2019 He berates me for using the phrase ‘we may never know’, when referring to the influence that the British and American governments may have had on the case, declaring: \u2018I have always distrusted that phrase ‘we may never know’ \u2013 it is a means of dropping a hint without ever revealing whether there is any truth in it.\u2019 How marvellous that he later writes: \u2018The SCCRC raised questions about the identification, which, it determined, were grounds for appeal. Whether that would have overturned the verdict we may never know<\/em> [my italics].\u2019<\/p>\n The hint dropped by this particular \u2018we may never\u2019 is that the verdict would have stood. To drive home the point he claims that Megrahi might have been convicted, even if he had not been correctly identified as the clothes purchaser. If he has properly read the court\u2019s judgment, he should know that the \u2018identification\u2019 \u2013 not an identification at all, of course \u2013 was central to the conviction. But maybe he hasn\u2019t properly read it, because, as he acknowledges, he is not a Lockerbie specialist. This is especially apparent in his account of the Heathrow evidence, which has come under fresh scrutiny thanks to the publication of the book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?<\/em> by another of his targets, Dr Morag Kerr. His Times article of 21 December highlighted an assertion by Mr Megrahi\u2019s trial counsel, Bill Taylor QC, that the Heathrow evidence was \u2018tested to destruction\u2019. An unnamed member of the defence team added: \u2018If the suggestion is that the bomb was placed on board at Heathrow, how on earth did it occur to anybody to take a trip to Malta in order to buy some children\u2019s clothing,\u00a0in order to take that clothing back to London to assemble a bomb?\u00a0\u00a0It just doesn\u2019t stack up.\u2019 Again, this was odd, because during his final submissions to the court Mr Taylor argued, quite rightly, that Maltese clothing did not prove that the bomb had begun its journey in Malta. Clothes bought weeks earlier had\u00a0plenty of time to leave the island prior to the bombing. Mr Linklater says that the implication that the bomber bought clothes in Malta and planted the bomb at Heathrow \u2018requires a heavy suspension of disbelief.\u2019 The idea that the same person bought the clothes and planted the bomb is, I agree, far fetched (although this is what the Crown posited at trial), but the not the suggestion that the bombers used the clothes to lay a false trail to Malta. As Mr Taylor asked during his final submissions: \u2018If\u00a0the clothes buyer had intended to place the bomb bag\u00a0onto a plane at Luqa, having regard to the high level\u00a0of risk of detection, wouldn’t one have expected him to\u00a0remove the clothing labels?\u2019<\/p>\n Mr Linklater claims that the SCCRC found the evidence of a Heathrow bomb \u2018so thin\u2019 that it did not bother to examine it. What the SCCRC actually said was that it did not examine the Heathrow evidence because it received no submissions on the matter, and because it received substantial attention at trial. The evidence we found when preparing Megrahi\u2019s second appeal was, in the view of senior counsel, significant and should have been before the trial court. It is clear, both from Dr Kerr\u2019s analysis and the second appeal team\u2019s, that the trial court was not given a clear view of the Heathrow evidence.<\/p>\n The undisputed Crown case was that the bomb exploded in a luggage container numbered AVE4041. Most of the bags in there had been unloaded from the Frankfurt feeder flight, PA103A, including, according to the Crown, the brown Samsonite suitcase from Malta. However, there was some other luggage in there, which had been loaded before PA103A arrived. These were supposedly Heathrow interline bags, meaning they had arrived at Heathrow on other flights. All of the loaders who were involved in packing AVE4041 confirmed something very significant: before the Frankfurt bags were loaded the entire floor of the container was covered with luggage. One of the loaders, John Bedford, recalled seeing something still more significant: a brown hardshell suitcase \u2018the type Samsonite make\u2019, positioned very close to where the explosion later occurred. He saw it when AVE4041 was in the interline baggage shed, well before the Frankfurt flight arrived. Bedford was clear that he hadn\u2019t put it there and so too was the only other person on duty in the shed, Sulkash Kamboj.<\/p>\n The police produced a detailed schedule of all the baggage that could have found its way into AVE4041. It demonstrated that a maximum of six Heathrow interline bags could have been in the container before PA103A arrived, all of which were within the normal size range. However \u2013 and here\u2019s the rub \u2013 covering the base of the container could have required seven or eight standard sized cases, just as in this photo:<\/p>\n The schedule showed something else very important: none of the six legitimate bags were brown, hard-shelled suitcases.<\/p>\n The loader who added the Frankfurt bags, Amarjit Sidhu, was sure that he did not move any of the bags that were already in AVE4041 when he added the Frankfurt bags, indeed, most of the loaders said that it was not their custom to rearrange bags. So, the Bedford suitcase must have been very close to the explosion, indeed, according to the Crown case, it should have been immediately below the brown Samsonite one from Malta. If the Malta suitcase existed, then the police should have recovered fragments of two brown hard-shelled cases, but they only found fragments of one. So, what happened to the Bedford case? The likely answer is that it contained the bomb and that the Malta case never existed.\u00a0 Security around the interline shed was non-existent and, as Bedford acknowledged in evidence, anyone with airside access could have placed a suitcase into the container.<\/p>\n The Crown claimed that the bomb suitcase was in the second layer of luggage, slightly overhanging the angled section of AVE4041. The scientific support for it is, to say the least, equivocal. And, if you look back at that photo, it\u2019s clear that a suitcase could be in the bottom layer yet still overhang the angled section.<\/p>\n The Crown disclosed the police schedule to the defence early on during the trial preparations and notified them that they would be running an exclusion case, ie they would show that all the bags in AVE4041 were legitimate apart from the one allegedly from Malta. But the schedule was not among the Crown productions that were later lodged with the court and, in the event, the Crown did not run an exclusion case, perhaps because they could not exclude the Bedford suitcase.<\/p>\n The Crown told the defence that the schedule contained inaccuracies, which may account for why the defence did not use it at trial. However, there is no evidence that the schedule\u2019s key findings \u2013 that there were only six legitimate items in AVE4041 when the Frankfurt flight arrived, none of which was a brown hard-sided case \u2013 were mistaken. If there was such evidence, the Crown would likely have used it to undermine the Bedford bag theory.<\/p>\n The defence have argued that they tested the Heathrow evidence to destruction, but Dr Kerr disagrees. Whoever is right, it remains the case that much of the key the evidence was not tested to destruction before the court. The Crown relied on the Maltese clothes and documents from Frankfurt airport to support their claim that the bomb had come from Malta, while the defence submitted that the Bedford case matched the bomb suitcase; that it was at, or could easily have been moved to, the location at which the explosion occurred; and that remains of only one brown hard-shelled case had been recovered. The crucial baggage schedule was not put before the court, likewise the voluminous witness and documentary evidence upon which it was based. Detailed evidence forensic and witness evidence about the likely positioning of most of the blast damaged cases (a potentially crucial issue in determining the location and identity of the primary suitcase) also went unheard and so too did the evidence of Sidhu, who added the Frankfurt luggage, who was sure that he never rearranged any of the bags.<\/p>\n The judges sidestepped the issue of the Bedford suitcase. They acknowledged that Bedford was \u2018a clear and impressive witness\u2019 and that the evidence supported the defence submission \u2018that a suitcase which could fit the forensic description of the primary suitcase was in the container when it left the interline shed.\u2019 They got around this by relying on evidence from another loader, Terence Crabtree, who was not involved in loading the Frankfurt bags into AVE4041, that luggage was sometimes rearranged. They acknowledged that, if this had happened \u2013 and according to the actual loader of AVE4041, Sidhu, it didn\u2019t \u2013 then the Bedford case could have ended up in the second layer, in exactly the position that the Crown claimed the primary suitcase was in. But, they then added: \u2018if there was such a rearrangement, the suitcase described by Mr Bedford might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container, and while the forensic evidence dealt with all the items recovered which showed direct explosive damage, twenty-five in total, there were many other items of baggage found which were not dealt with in detail in the evidence in the case.\u2019 So, it seemed that the judges believed that it for was the defence to run an exclusion case in order to prove the Bedford suitcase bomb scenario, not for the Crown to run one in order to prove the Maltese scenario, which was a novel reversal of the burden of proof, and one that fell a long way short of testing the Heathrow evidence to destruction. Dr Kerr has written much more on the subject in her book. It is an impressive work, rigorously detailed and logical. Her aim has been to uncover the truth, not to win a tactical court battle.<\/p>\n Mr Linklater\u2019s biggest howler is his assertion that Dr Kerr and I claim that the bombing was linked to a break-in that occurred at Heathrow 15 hours earlier. We do no such thing, indeed we both accept that the break-in may well be wholly irrelevant. Mr Linklater points out, as I have previously, that the matter was considered and rejected at Mr Megrahi\u2019s first appeal, but this does not excuse the Crown\u2019s failure to disclose it. Had the security guard who discovered it not come forward after Mr Megrahi\u2019s conviction, it would probably have remained covered up.<\/p>\n For all that he insults me as an irrational conspiracy theorist, we should be grateful to Mr Linklater for his contributions. The Megrahi case deserves public debate and, until he emerged as the voice of the \u2018It-couldn\u2019t-happen-here\u2019 tendency, that debate was very one-sided. When boiled down, his defence of the conviction is that the Crown case \u2018has been tested and re-tested under the strict conditions imposed by a court of law\u2019, whereas the counter evidence has not. Yet he knows that court scrutiny is no guarantee of a conviction\u2019s safety. The most notorious miscarriage of justice cases, like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, were only resolved when the courts accepted the evidence and arguments of the victims\u2019 supporters. Which begs a big question: when those convictions still stood, but their weakness were widely known, would Mr Linklater have defended them with equivalent vigour? As he might say, we may never know.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this month, together with other supporters of the \u2018Lockerbie bomber\u2019, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, I found myself accused in the Scottish Review of being an obsessive conspiracy theorist, impervious to fact or reason. The article\u2019s author, The Times columnist Magnus Linklater, … Continue reading \n
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