I wish someone
would come and argue the "Megrahi did it" case. It would give us some specific points to discuss. To my mind, though, it's a done deal.
- Whoever bought the clothes, it wasn't Megrahi - too young, not tall enough, and not the right build.
- Wherever the bomb was put on board, it wasn't Malta. And Megrahi was on Malta on 21st December 1988.
- Giaka was making stuff up to keep the CIA happy (and paying him money and keeping him in their witness protection programme).
The rest of the evidence was candy-floss - Megrahi's association with Bollier, which never extended to showing he'd ever had possession of an MST-13 timer, and Fhimah's diary, which said something about luggage tags in the context of a name that might have been Abdelbaset but might have been something else, which had an innocent explanation, and anyway, if you were a terrorist, would you write incriminating stuff in your diary, then leave it lying around and hand it over to the authorities quite willingly more than a year later?
If Megrahi didn't do it, and it wasn't done at Luqa, this throws everything back in the melting pot, but it still doesn't exonerate Libya. Maybe it was some other Libyans who completely evaded detection. Maybe.
But the timeline of the shifting of the blame is odd, and gradual, and inconsistent. The press reports blaming Libya started coming out in late 1989. Saddam Hussein didn't invade Kuwait until the summer of 1990, and the USA didn't go after him for this until early 1991. The indictments were later in 1991.
Some people have said the indictments were too late to be motivated by the desire to appease Syria and Iran, but the indictments were only the culmination of a process that had been going on possibly since March 1989, which actually seems too
early to be consitent with that motivation.
From about March 1989 there seems to have been official policy to downplay the PFLP-GC angle, but it kept resurfacing anyway, probably because the circumstantial evidence was too strong. (However, they may have been barking up one particular wrong tree which put a spanner in the works. Because baggage container AVE4041 contained no luggage belonging to passengers who had begun their journey at Heathrow, and most of the luggage in it was from Frankfurt, the investigation ignored the possibility of a clandestine introduction at Heathrow and concentrated on Frankfurt.)
Only after August 1989, when the Frankfurt police finally handed over the Erac printout of the PA103A loading records, did the Malta connection surface as a serious proposition. This culminated in the first interview with Gauci, in September 1989. Gauci believed the mystery shopper to be Libyan, and I think that's when the focus really shifted. I think the French newspaper report in September 1989 was the first public blaming of Libya, and English newspapers joined in about December.
Nevertheless, the FAI (which happened in 1990) was still all about the PFLP-GC, as if the legal process hadn't really caught up with changing theories. It wasn't that concerned with who put the bomb on board anyway, more with how it happened. (The legal justification for holding the FAI was the the Pan Am flight crew were at work when they died, and they were in Scotland when they died, which made holding an enquiry into work-related fatalities mandatory.)
So the changing focus from Syria to Libya happened well before the MST-13 fragment was identified in June 1990. It seems to have been the Erac printout followed by Gauci's testimony which really drove the shift in emphasis.
I can see why Marquise keeps saying, "it's the evidence, stupid". But it's evidence pointing to Libya, not evidence pointing to Megrahi, that he's talking about. The evidence pointing to
Megrahi is tissue paper. In a typhoon. However, if he's the only Libyan who could be linked with the incident in any way at all, is that telling in itself?
You know, this is beginning to make some twisted sort of sense, and it's in entirely the wrong thread, sorry.
Rolfe.
