Merged al Megrahi and the Lockerbie bombing

She's not up to speed yet. She's declaring that the evidence the MST-13 was planted is strong, but as we've seen it's not as easy to knock over as all that. She even seems to be giving some credence to Bollier's substitution claims, but again I think the evidence says that's bunk.

A lot of what she's alleging is just hearsay, or standard "pet theories" regurgitated. She doesn't even seem to have decided which pet theory she espouses. I hope she'll come to a clearer undertanding when she's had a chance to look at the evidence in detail.

The annoying thing is, it's really quite easy to come to the conclusion that Megrahi didn't buy the clothes from Gauci and didn't put the bomb on the plane. If that's the sum total of what is required to be proved then it's not exactly challenging. It's figuring out any sort of coherent narrative about what did happen that's the tricky bit.

I'm afraid she may join so many others in throwing around obfuscating doubt rather than illuminating the issue. I hope I'm wrong though.

Rolfe.
 
'm ashamed to say I had gotten Pierce and Grahame confused a little. I agree Pierce needs to not flail around so much, but Grahame for her part is A-okay. Her sideline with the movements of PT/35(b) didn't pan out so great (as we predicted), but I re-read here article "Megrahi is home. And he is innocent" and I decided she's in the right space all told and will do about as well as anyone up against the same behemoth.
I am convinced not only that Megrahi was not found guilty "beyond reasonable doubt", the test in Scot's law, but that he is an innocent man. [...] As for any inquiry, that's out there in the long grass. They are people in authority who are relying on Lockerbie fatigue setting in again. It mustn't.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...grahi-is-home-and-he-is-innocent-1776188.html

Thought I'd share two other interesting quoteable conservative politicians:
Margaret Thatcher: “December 21 - Lockerbie bombing.” (not 21 December? Hmmm) - The entire reference to the event in Thatcher’s 914-page memoir The Downing Street Years (1995). "We wish to add nothing to the text" - Her response when asked, by a British PA103 relatives' group, about the book’s silence.
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/12/bernard-ingham-on-lockerbie.html

One I didn't expect - David Frum, American political commnentor, neoconservative, speechwriter for Bush II. IIRC, it was Frum who was (at least half) responsible for the phrase "Axis of Evil."
For years, many well-informed people in the intelligence community have doubted al-Megrahi's guilt in the Lockerbie bombing. They have argued that the bombing was the work of a Syrian based Palestinian group, the PFLP-GC, working for the government of Iran. Among those who support the Iran-did-it theory are: (i) former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon; (ii) Robert Baer, the CIA official who worked directly on the Lockerbie case; (iii) Hans Koechler, the UN Security Council observer at al-Megrahi's trial; (iv) Robert Black, the Scottish lawyer who organized the trial proceedings; (v) Dr. Jim Swire, the spokesman for the families of British Lockerbie victims who lost his own daughter aboard Pan Am Flight 103; and (vi) David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.
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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/...tle-outcry-from-washington-on-al-megrahi.aspx
 
As I said, Christine Grahame is my local MSP, and I know her slightly. I've had personal email correspondence with her researcher about this issue, and I'm fairly sure she and her team are pretty solid on the research front.

Gareth Pierce, for all her stellar reputation, is very much a Johnny-come-lately to the Lockerbie debate. She is an English lawyer for a start, so it's not really her jurisdiction. I think she's just been reading Paul Foot and similar commentary (possibly even de Braeckeleer), without going too deeply into it as yet. However, she is a smart cookie who has passionate sympathy for victims of the "system", so I hope she reads a bit more, that's all.

Rolfe.
 
Sorry, not quite a full re-post, but it got some attention after Black posted it, and kicked up a bit of info the skeptics might like. An admission of guilt, partial guilt, says a respected guy - Arnaud de Borchgrave, via Frank Duggan and Prof. Black. I wrote about the response here:
http://12-7-9-11.blogspot.com/2010/01/admission-of-guilt.html
e-mail, in part, de Borchgrave to Duggan (solicited)
As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya.
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He claims it was after a July 1993 interview that Gaddafi dismissed all his bodyguards and admitted "off the record" that Libyan intelligence had agreed to be involved in Iran's retaliation for IA655. Two tellings at least predate the e-mail.

2009:
Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. ...
Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655 ... "[R]etaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). "Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?" said Gaddafi. "We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was," Gaddafi added."
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2004:
[Gaddafi] admitted Libya's guilt for the downing of Pan Am 103, but made clear that it was originally an Iranian [plot] ... “So the Iranians subcontracted part of the job to a Syrian intelligence service, which, in turn, asked the Libyan Mukhabarat to handle part of the assignment," Col. Gadhafi explained. "That is the way these things were planned in those days. If we had initiated the plot, we would have made sure the accusing finger was pointed in the other direction and we would have picked Cyprus, not Malta, where some of the organization was done. The others picked Malta presumably to frame us."
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Discuss.
 
Well, I've heard a number of alleged private confessions from various suspects in this affair. Jibril is alleged to have confessed. There are any number of people proffering individual pieces of evidence they happen to have, which point this way and that.

What makes this one different? Not a lot, it seems, judging from the discussion on Prof. Black's blog.

Rolfe.
 
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Brief summary is that the UN European consultant on explosives has done lots of tests blowing up combinations of radio, suitcase etc and in every case (20 explosions), none of the circuit board/timer etc survived the blast, it was just dust. More on newsnight tonight.
 
This is actually a lot more relevant in the thread specifically about the timer fragment (which I will bump).

Newsnight piece has been postponed because the Labour Party tried to depose Gordon Brown today. Possibly Friday, now.

Rolfe.

ETA: I see I'm well behind, it's already up there. Sorry, I heard about this on the morning radio news, but I've been shovelling snow all bloody day.
 
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Gordon Brewer has just announced that one of the Newsnicht ("Newsnight Scotland") items at 11pm will be "Should Megrahi ever have been convicted?"

I wish we were allowed to discuss some aspects of this in Politics, but it's apparently verboten.

Rolfe.

ETA: Just watched it, and it seems to have been a repeat of the item already under discussion from yesterday - I think it was shown in England yesterday, hence the slight confusion.

I return this discussion to the thread about the timer fragment, because that's what it was about, it didn't question the identification evidence or the Erac printout.

ETA again: The version on the BBC web site is slightly longer than what I just watched on TV - it has more criticism of Thurman.
 
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So Newsnight have investigated evidence that the MST-13 fragment was planted. The results strongly suggest that it was, and certainly warrant further testing.

Neither the report from Dr Wyatt nor the results of tests carried out pretrial seem to be available.
 
The BBC weren't saying the F-word. Just implying either that the fragment was some random thing that happened to resemble an MST-13 timer and just happened to be there (what??), or maybe that it was indeed a bit of an MST-13 timer, but again it just happened to be there and had nothing to do with the actual bomb. (What????!!)

Did they really come up the Clyde on a banana boat?

Rolfe.
 
Explosions are seriously unpredictable. While glass fiber is something you would generaly expect to be reduced to dust there are plently of reports of oddities surviving explosions.
 
Actually, that looks rather worthwhile. I'm not sure if I'm in the Glasgow office that day or not, and will have a look at my diary.
 
I wish it wasn't right in the middle of the working day though. I don't think I can get away, looking at our rota.

Rolfe.
 
I decided to read "The Book of Honor, The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives", by Ted Gup while I was away of the last few weeks.

It's an interesting read, although being honest his chapter on Matthew Gannon who was killed on 103 was my primary motive for reading it. This itself was instigated by a comment made by someone on Prof, Black blog a number of weeks ago called 'Baz'. I'm pretty sure in another comment from about a year ago, Baz asserted he was an ex-policeman. There was no indication whether this may have been US, UK, German or indeed another other nations LE agency. I'm assuming he was either Scottish or English, but that's merely a hunch, and I've no idea if he was originally involved in the original investigation or has simply become an interested party.

He also has a blog, "The Masonic Verses - Lockerbie and other Related Scams" available to read here : http://e-zeecon.blogspot.com/ Some of which is interesting and certainly provides another viewpoint for many of the issues discussed here about the 103 disaster.

However, he is fiercely adament about the 'drug theory' postulated by some as having a bearing on the way the crime was carried out as a 'hoax' and deliberate misdirection. Primarily that is, Allan Francovitch, Lester Coleman and John Ashton. Of course others claim it may have played a part, but he vehemently specifically focuses, unfairly imo, on those individuals.

Some might suggest that even if the drugs theory played no part in the actual bombing, it may have been instrumental in how the investigation, and the evidence recovered, would be steered. However, I digress.

He suggested, somewhat alarmingly for me anyway, a few weeks ago, that he did not belive that Matthew Gannon, part of a CIA team on the flight, had not been killed on 103.

....I've been interuppted here, and will come back to this later!
 
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Buncrana said:
He suggested, somewhat alarmingly for me anyway, a few weeks ago, that he did not belive that Matthew Gannon, part of a CIA team on the flight, had not been killed on 103.
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I also do not believe he was not killed there. :) I just got in e-mail contact with Baz like yesterday. Why does weird timing haunt me here? Nevermind... His name is Barry Walker, former police on Hong Kong, no connection to the case. It's a later interest, mostly spurred by the Ian Spiro story which I only barely know about. He is British, or at least lives in the UK, unless the stuff in the e-mail was untrue.

Also he's been invited to discuss here, but has been using a public library to access the net, and this site comes up as blocked, occult. Funny.

And since we're bumping the thread, I should hope the presentation with Dr. Swire et al gets posted online, but if not - well, mostly it's stuff we already know, probably. I would like to see it though. And I've started a long working essay on my blog - what's up is close to done and shows how proven liar Giaka largely built the case, first mentioning both accused.
http://12-7-9-11.blogspot.com/2010/01/three-year-test-drive.html

Also, annoying quotes from belligerent Americans
http://12-7-9-11.blogspot.com/2010/01/americans-sigh.html
 
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