Merged Lockerbie bomber alive after 9 months

Shaun from Scotland said:
I'll tell you what MS Gillibrand and Chuck, when the wanted, murdering IRA scumbags that are currently living in the lap of luxury in your own back yards with the collusion of your Politician pals get handed back to us, then come and lecture my country about the integrity of Government and justice served.

And Cameron should be telling Obama this!!
Click to expand...


Don't hold your breath! Cameron is going to go on brown-nosing Obama just the same way Blair brown-nosed Bush, no matter how much they are patronised and insulted.

Rolfe.
 
Travis said:
Heard in a restaurant yesterday:

Lady: So now it turns out BP got the Pan-Am 103 murderer freed.
Man: If they'd just'd executed him like we would have that could never have happened.
Lady: Maybe if we start putting those BP bastards on death row here things might be even.
Click to expand...

Thanks for catching and sharing that. And a chance to ask, as an American and one who doesn't buy CTs usually, but who's been able to see some of the amazing discussions here, well, what do you think?

Rolfe: From my info, the 3 months prognosis exam was I believe on August 3, and Fraser's report dated August 10. Just when was his appeal hprocess to start its hearing, last they heard at that point? Some date in November, correct?

Some crazy stuff going down. I really don't follow politics very close, here or there,so I'm just going to mostly luurk along the edges and read what y'all have to say.
 
Leave to appeal (for a second time, the first one was bungled) was sought in 2003. The SCCRC spent nearly four years investigating the facts, including re-interviewing many of the witnesses I believe. So we perhaps can't criticise that part of the delay too much - apart from anything else, they discovered about the Gaucis having been paid millions of dollars and relocated to Australia, which the defence hadn't known about.

Leave to appeal was granted in 2007, and everybody assumed it would come to court in 2008. However there were more delays and foot-dragging on the part of the Crown, to a large extent centred around the mysterious secret document that was being withheld by the government. Instead of hearing about the appeal, it was announced in September 2008 that Megrahi had aggressive prostate cancer. Even right then there was speculation about compassionate release, but the government said he wasn't sick enough, but maybe later.

The appeal finally came to court in April of 2009, and there were a few weeks of hearings. Then there was an adjournment. I had assumed that was directly because of the illness of one of the judges, but according to the primary source that illness wasn't announced until July. Whaever the cause, the case wasn't scheduled to come back to court until November 2009. Three months after the three-month prognosis was given.

It's quite possible Kenny and the rest of the establishment didn't influence the prognosis at all. He is certainly telling the truth about all the reports and recommendations from the appropriate bodies being in order. He seems to have jumped at the chance of getting the appeal withdrawn though.

Before that happened, there was speculation that the appeal might even have been continued on Megrahi's behalf after his death, possibly by one of his sons. Scots law allows for an interested party to continue the action when a defendant dies during the course of an appeal. Jim Swire was even talking about finding out whether he himself was eligible to be such an "interested party". However that can't be done now that it's been withdrawn.

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
It's all very interesting to be honest. After all that has happened, perhaps a rather spurious connection between Megrahi's release and BP, and that company's disasterous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, may well be the catalyst for finally finding out what really was going on with Megrahi's appeal being dropped.

If the pressure continues to mount on the SNP govt., and they are the ones left to carry the can for this whole debacle, while UK and US politicians continue to push the 'it was a sole Scottish decision and nothing to do with us because we'd have let him rot', perhaps they'll be pushed so far into a corner and have no other alternative but to release the full documents relating to his appeal (which have declined up to now) showing the 'likely innocence', and therefore the justification for his release - albeit under the compassionate ruling.

And that pressure does appear to be building.

Dr Hans Köchler, the UN appointed observer at the Lockerbie Trial issued this statement today expressing his support for the call by a group of United States Senators for an inquiry into the release by the Scottish government of the only person convicted in connection with the midair explosion of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie (Scotland) on 21 December 1988.

..an investigation to be meaningful, it must be independent of political interference and should deal with all aspects of Mr Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi's release [..]

An investigation should also address the question why Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Justice made the unprecedented step to visit the Lockerbie convict in Scotland's Greenock prison and what exactly he discussed with him in private. [..]

It is also to be recalled that, under Scots law, "compassionate release" does not require the termination of trial or appeal proceedings. Only a release under the provisions of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement between the UK and Libya (that was initiated by then Prime Minister Tony Blair) would have required the termination of proceedings. The Scottish Justice Secretary deliberately chose not to make use of this option. [..]

It is further to be recalled that, on 28 June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) stated that it suspects a miscarriage of justice and referred Mr al-Megrahi's case back to the appeal court. After much delay, the hearings of the second appeal had finally begun in 2009, only to be abruptly terminated by Mr al-Megrahi's (legally unnecessary) withdrawal of his application.

A meaningful investigation should find out the real motives behind the decision of the Scottish Justice Secretary.
Click to expand...

http://i-p-o.org/IPO-nr-Megrahi-release-investigation-21July2010.htm

http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2010/07/compassionate-release-of-lockerbie.html
 
Thanks, Buncrana, I was just coming to post that link. If Prof. Kochler has come out of the woodwork (or rather out of the web into RL), things may get slightly more serious.

Most of the posturing politicians probably haven't a clue about the real issues. They're only after press exposure sounding tough on a subject they perceive as resonating with the public. However, if they offer enough opportunity to say, do you realise this conviction was a complete travesty, they may accomplish rather more than they intended.

It's undeniable there is a pretty sizeable cover-up here. I've even considered, is it a cover-up of genuine evidence Megrahi was guilty, obtained in ways the spooks don't want to tell us about, as suggested by some of the CT-debunkers. However, that seems extremely unlikely, partly because we know the nature of the ace-in-the-hole evidence the prosecution thought it had, and it was discredited, and partly because the plan Megrahi is supposed to have been part of is insane and would have had a high chance of falling flat on its face at several different stages.

It seems quite probable that it's as Martin Cadman says. The US and UK governments of the time knew exactly what happened, but had their reasons for not allowing that to become public. In my opinion, possibly a badly botched attempt to stop something like this happening, which ended up actually causing it to happen.

Twenty years on, how strong is the need or desire to keep the secrecy going? It may be that by now, what is being covered up is the act of covering up, not the original secret as such. An investigation of the circumstances under which the Frankfurt airport baggage records mysteriously vanished wholesale, days after the disaster, might still yield some interesting factoids.

Rolfe.
 
Take a look at this Guardian CiF article. Lockerbie truth must be known.

The author is yet another of the UK relatives, who seem to be able to speak for themselves instead of hiding behind a paid spokesman who has no personal stake in this, and little knowledge of the facts. Pamela Dix lost her brother at Lockerbie. She has never said she is convinced Megrahi is innocent, merely that we don't know what happened.

The comments are as interesting as the article, actually. It seems that everyone and his dog (or at least the portion of them that post on CiF) knows that Zeist was a kangaroo court.

Rolfe.
 
Caustic Logic said:
Thanks for catching and sharing that. And a chance to ask, as an American and one who doesn't buy CTs usually, but who's been able to see some of the amazing discussions here, well, what do you think?
Click to expand...

It sounds like a horrible bit of FUBAR. Letting the US get involved with what sure seems like a dubious conviction doesn't make anybody look good. I think there really should be a thorough investigatory commission into all this new information. But....who would do it?


And one thing keeps gnawing at me though. Why? Why go through the mechanics of rigging things to get this guy? Why blame it on Libya if it was likely someone else that the US and UK hated?
 
I don't think the issue is that Libya wasn't involved but that al-Megrahi isn't involved.

But if -- as it appears Rolfe is indicating -- the compassionate release was engineered to terminate an appeal that would probably have reversed the conviction, then I think Scotland is getting all the bad press is deserves.

Have the courage of your convictions (literally). If the guy is innocent, let the appeal play out. Don't abuse some other process (compassionate release) to avoid the embarrassment of having the conviction overturned on appeal.

If Scotland wants to do the right thing, someone in the government should stand up and say, "We sent him home because he wasn't guilty. We knew it, and the appeal would have confirmed it. We didn't feel like waiting for our own appeals process to play out in the normal course, so we got a doctor to say al-Megrahi had 3 months to live, and used 'compassionate release' to justify it."

It might not stop the hoopla, but at least it would be honest and forthright. Right now, the Scottish government is stuck defending what appears to be a very shaky compassionate release determination, rather than upholding the more laudable concept of releasing an innocent man.
 
Heads up, anyone who can receive Newsnight Scotland. Gary Robertson has just announced that he is going to interview Hans Kochler about why the conviction was a travesty and a set-up, at 11 o'clock on BBC2 Scotland. Might be online in England, don't know about abroad.

This might be good.

ETA: Started 5 minutes early....

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
Interviews seem to be going over a number of the points which have been brought up by you, Caustic and other posters here, which is good, but it really needs to be put across in the States I think.
 
Last edited:
Travis said:
It sounds like a horrible bit of FUBAR. Letting the US get involved with what sure seems like a dubious conviction doesn't make anybody look good. I think there really should be a thorough investigatory commission into all this new information. But....who would do it?


And one thing keeps gnawing at me though. Why? Why go through the mechanics of rigging things to get this guy? Why blame it on Libya if it was likely someone else that the US and UK hated?
Click to expand...

Nobody claims it is anything to do with a desire to frame any individual.

Maybe the someone else might have been someone the US/UK hated at the time of Lockerbie (or simply a mercenary group hired by someone the US/UK hated), but by the time the investigation moved forward was politically very useful to the US/UK?

"There is, in my opinion (not necessarily shared by the families), an explanation for all this, an explanation so shocking that no one in high places can contemplate it. It is that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects - some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/mar/31/lockerbie.libya
 
commandlinegamer said:
Interviews seem to be going over a number of the points which have been brought up by you, Caustic and other posters here, which is good, but it really needs to be put across in the States I think.
Click to expand...


Nobody's listening over there.

The Newsnicht interview was moderately stellar. Hans Kochler followed by Jim Swire followed by a local university don who is an expert in US politics. It should be available some time soon on iPlayer on this link. ETA here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t4pzh I'll try to summarise.

Kochler's English is good but not entirely fluent, and he spoke slowly. He was also being rather reserved and inviting Gary to make inferences rather than saying what he meant. He said there might be something to investigate as regards the UK government and the prisoner transfer arrangement, but that was irrelevant to the actual release so it was rather peripheral.

He then moved on to the withdrawal of the appeal, and questioned why that happened. Surely it was in the interests of justice to allow it to continue? His implication seemed to be that Megrahi had had his arm twisted by Kenny MacAskill in the visit Kenny made to Greenock prison. He had the time-line. Kenny does his prison visit on 4th August, Megrahi applies to withdraw the appeal on 12th August, leave granted to withdraw the appeal on 18th August, compassoinate release granted 20th August. (Anyone who wants to search the live thread for that date will notice I made exactly the same inference.)

Kochler went on to question why the visit was made. Gary pointed out he said he felt the prisoner had a right to make representation to him. Kochler pointed out the move was unprecedented, had never happened in any other compassionate release. The three of them (Gary, Kochler and Jim Swire) seemed to spend a lot of time asking each other why Megrahi withdrew the appeal, and answer came there none.

At the end of the interview, Kochler moved on from BP, which he said was peripheral, and the withdrawal of the appeal, which clearly angered him, to calling for a review of the original trial and first appeal.

Gary then turned to Jim Swire, who said he wholeheartedly supported an overarching enquiry. That the UK relatives had been waiting 20 years for such a thing. That the FAI found that the bombing was prevantable, which should have mandated an enquiry to determine how, and where the errors had been, but this never happened. He went on to say he didn't believe Libya had anything to do with it, which rather implied that Megrahi was innocent. He went back over the "they blamed the PFL-GC for the first two years" story (which as we know unpacks rather differently), and said that in his opinion it was about Middle East power politics from the start, which usually means oil, and it simply wasn't politically acceptable to pursue the real culprits. He pointed out that Margaret Thatcher, the latter years of whose premiership had been dominated and overshadowed by Lockerbie, stated implicitly in her autobiography that Libya was not responsible.

Swire, I think, was the one who made the point most strongly about the prisoner transfer agreement. The Scottish government was bitterly opposed to it from the get-go. It felt it was a shady deal about trade agreements (bang on, obviously), and it was angry that a reserved Scottish matter was being horse-traded by Tony Blair. Alex Salmond protested strongly about it almost as soon as he became first Minister. This is true, and I think it is extremely important.

Swire's theory about the withdrawal of the appeal was different from Kochler's. He said that Megrahi was almost certainly in regular contact with Libya, and the Libyan government may well have urged him to withdraw the appeal to maximise his chances of repatriation. I think Swire was implying that Libya has long ago accepted that it traded accepting the blame for Lockerbie and acceding to the Camp Zeist trial, for ending the sanctions and the beginning of rehabilitation into the civilised world. Libya does not feel it is in its national interests to upset that applecart, an applecart which would undoubtedly be upset if Magrahi's conviction was to be overturned on appeal.

Finally, the academic tried to explain how come the Americans had so completely failed to grasp any of this. Basically that a federated country didn't understand Britain, called Britain England, and as devolutoin was only 11 years old, wasn't really aware of it yet. Or something. And that the senators are getting kudos from their constituencies for the way they're behaving, and that's really all that matters.

Hopefully the clip will be available to view soon. It lasted for about 15 minutes.

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
Jaggy Bunnet said:
Nobody claims it is anything to do with a desire to frame any individual.

Maybe the someone else might have been someone the US/UK hated at the time of Lockerbie (or simply a mercenary group hired by someone the US/UK hated), but by the time the investigation moved forward was politically very useful to the US/UK?

"There is, in my opinion (not necessarily shared by the families), an explanation for all this, an explanation so shocking that no one in high places can contemplate it. It is that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects - some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/mar/31/lockerbie.libya
Click to expand...


It was mid-March 1989. Paul Foot is fairly sound on the subject. Paul Channon was sat on by Thatcher on 17th March, so it was very shortly before then.

A number of us, currently only myself, Caustic Logic and Buncrana, have been busting our brains in the CT forum sifting the evidence on this for about a year. Nobody else seems to care a dime. Back last summer, any mention of this subject was a sure-fire trigger for some US posters to demand the thread in question be moved to Conspiracy Theories, and then it promptly died because they didn't post to it any more.

Nevertheless, there are about half a dozen threads where we've teased out the evidence for this and other suggestions, and it unpacks rather differently from the simplistic common perception of a sudden change of direction in late 1990. That's when it became public, and when PC Plod was told to go after a different suspect, but the roots do indeed go back to March 1989, and possibly (in the case of Frankfurt airport) to 22nd December 1988.

There seems to be some sort of agreement on this forum that because 9/11 wasn't a conspiracy (OK, it was, a bunch of Arabs conspired to fly some aeroplanes into some large buildings), and man really did land on the moon, and Oswald really did shoot Kennedy, that the Official Story is true in every single instance. Particularly if it involves Arab terrorists downing a US airliner.

It ain't necessarily so.

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for that Rolfe. I managed to catch it there, and your summary covers it well.

What I find perplexing is, why didn't the Scottish govt just make sure the appeal was allowed to continue while offering compassionate release?

I appreciate the immense problems would come with the likely acquittal, but c'mon folks, take the bull by the horns, show the people of Scotland you do have values, principles and have the strength of your convictions, that seperate you from the old colonial rulers at Wesminster. Paving the way for a huge surge in new voters and thereby actually strengthening the rallying call for independence.

For the political status quo? Well that particular agenda looks like it may well, eventually the way things are going, present you in with just as many, if not more hypocritical shadows, than westminister. Certainly outside of Scotland if the UK and US have their way.

There is a way to cast off the mud being slung that's beginning to stick: set up a public enquiry and get the documents relating to the appeal and SCCRC conclusion made available.
 
Here's what's been bugging me about the withdrawal of the appeal. The official explanation, so far as there is one, is that Megrahi had applied both for prisoner transfer and for compassionate release. Since the former required the withdrawal of the appeal, he decided to withdraw it to maximise his chances of getting home.

This is slightly odd for a start. And you know what? A few pennies are dropping with me right now.

This simply doesn't make any sense though. Megrahi had a TV in prison, that was well-known. (Gadaffi bought him a large-screen plasma TV, and the other prisoners liked to watch football on it - this was a random news story years ago.) He also read newspapers. He gave an interview to a Herald journalist in which he said the Herald was his preferred newspaper. He had tried to persuade his fellow-prisoners of its merits, but they stubbornly favoured the Sun.

So, Megrahi was following the same news sources as I was. I knew all along that an SNP government would never grant him a prisoner transfer. Alex Salmond spoke out bitterly against it right at the start, tried (unsuccessfully) to have Megrahi exempt from it, and denounced it as a shabby deal for commercial interests. Just as Jim Swire said. It never got any better. SNP disapproval of the Labour Deal in the Desert never waned. It simply was not going to happen. If I knew that, Megrahi knew that.

So why bother with the prisoner transfer at all? It was quite obvious from 6th August (the release of Ronnie Biggs, the precedent that nobody seems to be mentioning at the moment) that Megrahi would be freed by compassionate release also. It was only a matter of time. And interested parties were all pleased that this would allow the appeal to continue. Which should have suited Megrahi as well.

At the very least, why not wait and see what happened? If compassionate release had been refused, he could always have withdrawn the appeal then and re-applied for the prisoner transfer. But he didn't do it that way.

So the "he wanted to maximise his chances of getting home by keeping the prisoner transfer option open" argument doesn't hold water. He wasn't going to get prisoner transfer and he must have known that. Not until a future time when the SNP was no longer in power, anyway.

Kochler thinks Kenny went to Greenock and twisted his arm, basically saying I'll grant the compassionate release if you withdraw the appeal, face to face with no written records to give away the deal. And this may be so. But Jim Swire's take on it has made me think of a completely different angle.

Someone asked, some time back, so they were dragging their feet on the appeal, what would they have done if Megrahi hadn't contracted cancer? I said, go on dragging, and hoped they were either out of office by the time it was finally decided, or that something would come up. And prostate cancer came up. I was making the astonishingly naive assumption that without the cancer, the appeal would have got to court in the end.

The penny that just dropped is that, no, that appeal was never going to make it. What was going to come up was the prisoner transfer agreement. The prostate cancer was just a complication.

Swire is right. Libya moved on from Lockerbie years ago. They wrote a weasel-worded letter "taking responsibility for the actions of our agents", and turned over a couple of Libyans for trial, and made all the Lockerbie relatives who could stomach to take the money considerably wealthier than they were already (they received millions in the 1990s from a lawsuit against Pan Am). This all happened gradually, as Libya was gradually rehabilitated back into the community of civilised nations.

The last of the money was paid over in 2008 I think, but even before that, the rehabilitation was proceeding apace. The Deal in the Desert in 2007 was an important milestone, oil deals for BP and prisoner transfer agreements and so on.

Obviously, Libya accepting responsibility for Lockerbie was always part of it. Making sure Libya went on accepting resonsibility would be an important part of it. Of course Libya wanted Megrahi home. But it was also in everyone's interests (except his and the people who would rather like the truth to come out) for the appeal to be stopped.

Libya applied for the prisoner transfer on Megrahi's behalf. We know that, and that's the way it would work anyway. Who knows what conflicts were going on between Megrahi, who wanted to stay in jail for the appeal to be heard, and Libya, who (I think) had come to an agreement as part of all these deals that the appeal would be withdrawn, urging going the prisoner transfer route?

I strongly suspect that's what a lot of the delay was about. Keep that appeal out of court, play for as much time as possible, so that the prisoner transfer agreement can eventually come into action.

There was stalemate in 2007 and 2008, as the Scottish government wouldn't wear prisoner transfer anyway, and Megrahi didn't want to withdraw the appeal. In September 2008, Megrahi was diagnosed with cancer. This opened the compassionate release route, which was acceptable to the Scottish government, but didn't require the appeal to be withdrawn.

In the end it came to the same thing. Megrahi was told, withdraw the appeal, and you can go home. The day after he flew out, his solicitor Mr. Kelly came on TV and said his client had been pressurised. Later, he himself said the same thing. He never said who pressurised him. Was it Kenny, as Kochler thinks, or Gadaffi, as Swire thinks?

It could very well have been both of them.

Rolfe.
 
Last edited:
Lengthy but excellent article from Scotlands Lawyers' Magazine, "The Firm".

Here's a portion.

[...]No one in Edinburgh, Washington, London or Libya wants to talk about the embarrassment to Scots law and affront to international justice that was the Lockerbie trial.

No one wants to talk about the fabricated material that was introduced as evidence, or the flaws in the Crown case or the bribery of key witnesses. No one wants to talk about the daily briefings imposed upon the bereaved families to try and persuade them all was well when the show trial had collapsed under the weight of its own inadequacy. [...]


No one wants to talk about the witnesses whose testimony wasn’t heard, and those witnesses who were heard, but whose testimony was a tissue of lies and inconsistency paid for by US intelligence. No one wants to talk about the prevarications of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, whose report into the Megrahi conviction -at least, those parts of it released- went to great lengths to dismiss the work of investigative journalists over the 19 preceding years, before reluctantly, grudgingly, yet narrowly choking on its acceptance that a miscarriage of justice had in all probability taken place.

No one wants to talk about the closed courts, the security vetted, court appointed defenders, the intelligence documentation that is protected by PII, the pressure applied to ensure Megrahi dropped his appeal, the refusal to hold a public inquiry despite the obvious need, the destroyed police notebooks, the inconsistent testimony, the limitations and narrowness of the appeal process, the clear and evident lack of guilt of the man convicted of doing something even the court agreed could not be established with any logic that fit the evidence, far less proven.
[...]

No. Instead, our Prime Minister, our First Minister, our Foreign Secretary, a gaggle of US Senators and their Foreign Secretary want to talk about why a bomber was released. The circumstances of how a bomber was released. Who made the decision to release a bomber. Whether BP had anything to do with a bomber’s release. Why a bomber hasn’t died yet. Whether a bomber should be returned to a Scottish jail. Bomber, bomber, bomber. Are you getting it?
Click to expand...

Full "The Firm" article
 
Shaun from Scotland said:
I'll tell you what MS Gillibrand and Chuck, when the wanted, murdering IRA scumbags that are currently living in the lap of luxury in your own back yards with the collusion of your Politician pals get handed back to us, then come and lecture my country about the integrity of Government and justice served.
Click to expand...

Who are they (the murdering IRA scumbags in New York)? What were they convicted of and what actions have the Scottish and/or British government done to attempt to have them extradited?
 
Buncrana said:
What I find perplexing is, why didn't the Scottish govt just make sure the appeal was allowed to continue while offering compassionate release?

I appreciate the immense problems would come with the likely acquittal, but c'mon folks, take the bull by the horns, show the people of Scotland you do have values, principles and have the strength of your convictions, that seperate you from the old colonial rulers at Wesminster. Paving the way for a huge surge in new voters and thereby actually strengthening the rallying call for independence.

For the political status quo? Well that particular agenda looks like it may well, eventually the way things are going, present you in with just as many, if not more hypocritical shadows, than westminister. Certainly outside of Scotland if the UK and US have their way.

There is a way to cast off the mud being slung that's beginning to stick: set up a public enquiry and get the documents relating to the appeal and SCCRC conclusion made available.
Click to expand...


See below. I was completely puzzled by this. Kenny can be a pompous ass, but he's a likeable human being too. It's been common knowledge in the SNP for years that Megrahi was wrongly convicted.

Suppose, though, Tony Blair and Gadaffi had agreed to a deal which made sure Libya stayed "responsible" for Lockerbie in perpetuity. This avoided rocking any boats, and ensured that nobody had to open a cold case involving 270 murders. The prisoner transfer wasn't just about having the scapegoat home, it was about peace and stability in the Middle East.

Gadaffi could then lean on Megrahi to take one more for the team, withdraw the appeal, and come home - ostensibly to a Tripoli jail, but once he was in Libya that was probably something that would be very difficult to enforce. We all know you didn't do it, and so on.

Megrahi seems to have been a semi-willing sacrificial lamb. He could quite probably have got an acquittal by being a lot more forthcoming to the court about what he was actually doing on 20th-21st December 1988. However, his acquiescence never extended to admitting guilt, and the appeal seems to have been very important to him. Interesting dilemma.

I'm still guessing about the details of this, but if the main pressure on Megrahi was coming from Libya, Kenny might have been relatively powerless. It's making a little bit more sense this way anyway....

Rolfe.
 
Buncrana said:
Lengthy but excellent article from Scotlands Lawyers' Magazine, "The Firm".

Here's a portion.

Full "The Firm" article
Click to expand...


You know, I posted a link and a quote from that this afternoon, but took it down when I read the full article. Most of it is extraordinarily good. But the bloody man is a Lockerbie no-Samsoniter. He thinks all the evidence of the suitcase and the clothes was planted. There are only about three sentences to that effect, but the trouble is, nonsense like that just allows the entire brilliant production to be dismissed.

Rolfe.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom