Charles Norrie's Lockerbie theory

[Rolfe]

Rolfe, there is no point in trying to discuss things with you, until you tell us exactly what is your theory of what went on.

That's a complete non-sequitur. This isn't a competition between different theories, this is you trying to persuade us that your theory is credible.

You are unwilling to do the basic reading (which I have done, and you have not).

Charles, with practically every post you make, you demonstrate abysmal ignorance of those pesky facts you disdain so much. That's what the basic reading is for. Finding out the nature of the facts your theory has to explain.

You seem to have a short fuse and a low incredulity level.

Look, I'm not the one who's gathered four yellow cards and a day on the naughty step since the start of this thread. And I think you'll find that a "low incredulity threshhold" is a common feature among JREF members. We like to crash-test theories by running them into the wall. If the theory is sound, the pieces are from the wall. Right now, all the pieces I'm finding are from your jerry-built hypothesis though.

I don't know where you believe the device was introduced or when. Such little things matter you know.

Then you haven't been reading my posts.

I don't know whether you believe in the Bedford story (and his telling of it or not).

"Believe". Such a strong word. Bedford's story is however the only recorded sighting of a brown(ish) Samsonite hardshell suitcase anywhere in the incident, apart from the bomb bag. And the circumstances of the sighting are singular, and the place where it was sighted was very close to where the explosion was eventually determined to have occurred.

So in my opinion it's the best bet for the introduction of the primary suitcase. That, and other reasons which favour a Heathrow introduction.

I'm not certain why the Bedford story was introduced at the trial as it appears to fly in the face of what is the Crown's contention that a timer bomb was flown without difficulty from Luqa to London via Frankfurt having been labelled there with one of Mr Fhimah's famous tags. If that is so surely it would have been transferred on the tarmac at Heathrow when 103A arrived at 17:40?

It's odd that Bedford was apparently a prosecution witness, I agree. But they could hardly sweep him under the carpet after he'd given evidence to the FAI, so I assume they thought they'd better call him and try to undermine his story.

So what is Bedford describing as the two rogue suitcases. Mr Kamboj had no recollection of them. It is Kamboj's word versus Bedford's and he had taken part in a reconstruction with the Met police, a reconstruction that may have influenced his recollection. If you notice it is nowadays not standard police procedure to have recosnstructions as it can induce a false recollection syndrome.

Kamboj just doesn't remember. In the end, he said that if Bedford says that's what happened, it probably did. You still have absolutely no explanation why Bedford described seeing "a maroony-brown hardshell suitcase, of the type Samsonite make" in the container, less than a fortnight after the bombing and before the pieces of Samsonite primary suitcase had even been picked up off the grass never mind forensically examined.

It is general held that AVE4041 PA held the first class baggage (first off at JFK).

Sorry, not good enough. AVE4041 held first, interline baggage from connecting flights arriving at Heathrow during the day. Nobody has ever suggested that only the first class luggage in this category was placed in that container. If you know different, give us the source you're using. Second, it held luggage from PA103A. Some commentators do suggest there was some sorting at that point, but the numbers involved imply that if this was so, it would have been the first class bags (a relatively small number) that were loose-loaded, and the pleb class (most of them) that were put in the container. Karen Noonan's case being in the container also supports that reading.

"General held" doesn't even cut it it it's true. In this case, I don't even think this is generally held.

Rolfe you are a very difficult woman of fixed but unclear views, who loves to wallow in unclear detail, is prepared to blog but not to slog, and I have come to hold your views in contempt. Such a pity when you are quite capable of being a creative imaginative think.

When I see you slogging rather than simply making stuff up to suit yourself, I'll accept your right to criticise others. And as I said, I don't blog.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Rolfe, if you follow my thesis, that an Iranian by the needs of qesas had to plant the first device, or no qesas, it was probably done to a IA plan. The main point of the first explosion was to turn the radr transponder off and damage the pressure hull with a relatively small 15 by 15 inch hold, which had been 8 by 8 at the exit from the container

Oh, I follow your thesis all right. I enjoy imaginative fiction!

Rolfe.

 

[Sabretooth]

Charles...are you going to answer my legitmate questions, or are you going to just sit there and bicker with everyone?

 

[CharlesNorrie]

None of your questions sabre or Rolfe are in anyway legitimate or sensible.

I think you're probably trying to get at me because you've just spent your time there nitpicking and blogging, and you've really no idea of theory building or proof or anything. Sabre is a typical US incredulist who cannot believe the precious CIA can get up to anything as wicked as the Lockerbie bombing. Rolfe is just a no-hoper contrarian who blogs away because she has nothing better to do in life.

I'm not up against you, but my theory is being quashed on Wikipedia. And I can prove it.

Enjoy the rest of your very silly and wastrel lives.

 

[Guybrush Threepwood]

I'm not up against you, but my theory is being quashed on Wikipedia. And I can prove it.

Then please do so...

 

[Ambrosia]

Just a bit of an aside about the small bomb and the importance of positioning.

The Official Version would have us believe that the bomb was sent on its merry unaccompanied way from Malta, to be loaded into AVE4041 wherever the loaders chose to put it. I can't say what the chances were that it would end up close enough to the skin to breach the hull, even, but certainly less than 50%. Maybe 30%?

I think that the positioning of the bomb and the way that it blew the whole plane apart is just another sad coincidence.

I have no problem believing that the bomb was placed into the cargo hold with the perpetrators fully believing it to be powerful enough to blow the plane out of the sky no matter it's actual position within the hold relative to the skin of the aircraft. I think that the bombers wanted to blow up the plane and didn't much care where or when it happened so long as it was at cruising altitude and not on the tarmac, I think it just so happened that the bomb was placed within the container in about the right place to destroy the plane entirely

Charles your theory does not square with the evidence. It reads like a fanciful explanation of what happened, and I don't see you putting forward facts or sources of evidence to support your claims.

You say:

It's been a paper exercise. All the information with the exception of odd questions to Mr Bollier and Mr Marquise ... is in the public domain.

So show us the evidence thats already in the Public domain that proves your case, point us to the public domain sources you found in your years of trawling the web, and please explain why your hypothesis makes the most sense out of all the available evidence to hand

 

[Sabretooth]

To expand on what GT said, the positioning of the bomb seems to have been extraordinarily unlucky. Or not, as the case may be.

There were a couple of earlier aircraft bombing attempts, at least one of them a Jibril operation, where the bomb merely blew a hole in the baggage hold and the plane limped back to land. I think in one case some passengers were sucked out of the hole and killed but the rest were saved.

However, in the Air India crash in 1985, which involved a 747 just like the Lockerbie incident, the plane did pretty much the same as Maid of the Seas did. This was because the bomb, planted by Sikh extremists, was (apparently by chance) exactly on a structurally weak spot where two large parts of the aircraft were joined at manufacture.

Much has been made of the cross-sectional position of the Lockerbie bomb being in precisely the spot in the container closest to the skin of the plane. However, it appears that the saggital section positioning was just as important, at the section 41/42 fuselage join. (I'm taking this from Carl Davies, who is a bit of a CTer, but this information appears to be accurate.)

The AAIB report had to do quite a bit of calculation and so on to show how the small explosion could have done so much damage. They did however conclude that there was only one device on board. Which Charles thinks means they know there were two but they're just obliquely hinting at the second to tease us.

The single baggage container with the Frankfurt transfer luggage was the last on, because there was a very small time window between the feeder flight and the transatlantic one. This seems to have been the case routinely, and as far as I know it was always at position 41. I have a suspicion that whoever planted the bomb knew enough about the baggage loading for that flight to spot this opportunity.

ETA: I'm not sure the Mach Stem effect could have been reliably predicted by the terrorists. However, the effect of position 41 was presumably predictable, after what happened to Air India 182.

Rolfe.

To expand a bit on what I was referring to:

It doesn't take much to have an aircraft suffer severe or critical damage due to explosive decompression. Here's a rather famous example:

Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243^WP

However, AAF243 was not quite the disaster as this:

China_Airlines_Flight_611^WP

The potential for even a small defect to cause wholesale destruction is clearly evident. Which is why there should be little, if any, “surprise” coming from any experienced investigator of the PA103 disaster.

 

[Sabretooth]

None of your questions sabre or Rolfe are in anyway legitimate or sensible.

Sabre is a typical US incredulist who cannot believe the precious CIA can get up to anything as wicked as the Lockerbie bombing.

I never said, or even implied, that I felt the CIA could be 100% trustworthy. You are failing Reading Comprehension 101.

I POINT BLANK asked you about two serious flaws I found in your theory...due to the lack of a hand-slapping from the mods, I can safely assume my questions were done so in good taste.

Your lack of integrity and obvious question-dodging are duly noted.
Either debate YOUR accusations or leave. All you're doing now is trolling in an attempt to irritate people.

 

[Rolfe]

I think that the positioning of the bomb and the way that it blew the whole plane apart is just another sad coincidence.

I have no problem believing that the bomb was placed into the cargo hold with the perpetrators fully believing it to be powerful enough to blow the plane out of the sky no matter it's actual position within the hold relative to the skin of the aircraft. I think that the bombers wanted to blow up the plane and didn't much care where or when it happened so long as it was at cruising altitude and not on the tarmac, I think it just so happened that the bomb was placed within the container in about the right place to destroy the plane entirely

You could be right. However, I don't think the PFLP-GC were amateurs, and they'd had cases before where similar amounts of explosives had inflicted sub-lethal damage.

It could just have been coincidental positioning, it's just that there is so much alleged coincidence in this case already, I'm getting a bit allergic to it.

Charles your theory does not square with the evidence. It reads like a fanciful explanation of what happened, and I don't see you putting forward facts or sources of evidence to support your claims.

So show us the evidence thats already in the Public domain that proves your case, point us to the public domain sources you found in your years of trawling the web, and please explain why your hypothesis makes the most sense out of all the available evidence to hand

I wish he's do that, but the best I ever got from him in the past was the assertion that he'd provided his hypothesis, and it must be regarded as correct until we were able to refure it. Of course refuting it is not the problem, getting Charles to understand that it has been refuted is the problem.

Rolfe.

 

[zooterkin]

I think you're probably trying to get at me because you've just spent your time there nitpicking and blogging, and you've really no idea of theory building or proof or anything.

Rolfe is just a no-hoper contrarian who blogs away because she has nothing better to do in life.

How many times do you need to be told that Rolfe does not blog? If you can't get a simple fact like that right, how do you hope to deal with something important?

I'm not up against you, but my theory is being quashed on Wikipedia. And I can prove it.

Is this something different from what has already been explained to you, regarding publishing your own, original, material on wikipedia?

Enjoy the rest of your very silly and wastrel lives.

Well, it's been fun for a while, but I can't help feeling you're on a path to getting yourself banned here, or at least spending long periods on suspension, whether deliberately or not. One must work quite hard to get banned, but you do seem to be prepared to put in the effort.

 

[CharlesNorrie]

Go and look Mr Threepwood, a character I only know from Wodehouse, at the Pan Am 103 conspiracies page. You will see that there is no theory that links the US Government and Iran to Lockerbie, and when I tried to post one is disappeared in half an hour. Why? Mr Bert Stossberg who reverted my entry ran (or runs) a website on KAL-007, backing official theory, which as we know (vide Robert Johnson of Oxford University) is rubbish.

 

[zooterkin]

Go and look Mr Threepwood, a character I only know from Wodehouse, at the Pan Am 103 conspiracies page.

This page?

You will see that there is no theory that links the US Government and Iran to Lockerbie, and when I tried to post one is disappeared in half an hour.

Could you give us a clue when this happened, or the revision number? I don't see it on the first page of the history.

 

[Sabretooth]

Go and look Mr Threepwood, a character I only know from Wodehouse, at the Pan Am 103 conspiracies page. You will see that there is no theory that links the US Government and Iran to Lockerbie, and when I tried to post one is disappeared in half an hour. Why? Mr Bert Stossberg who reverted my entry ran (or runs) a website on KAL-007, backing official theory, which as we know (vide Robert Johnson of Oxford University) is rubbish.

Because wikipedia requires facts and sources, not assumptions and story telling.

Just because one or two loonies believe a work of fiction, it doesn't make it worthy of wiki.

 

[Rolfe]

You will see that there is no theory that links the US Government and Iran to Lockerbie, and when I tried to post one....

I think you'll find that's the problem right there. Wiki is an encyclopedia, not a platform for posting your own personal obsessions. Wiki is recording and referencing theories that actually have a presence in the public domain.

Since you had steadfastly refused to publish your theory until this week, then your theory was not in the public domain, therefore it was not part of the literature of "Lockerbie conspiracy theories" - which is what the page is about.

Now that the theory is published on the internet, there might be some possibility of inserting some reference to it, linking to the pdf you published. However, wiki doesn't necessarily like this either, since writing an article and self-publishing it is a pretty obvious way for people to get round this problem and it isn't as if it hasn't been tried plenty times before.

Because of this, editing an entry to add a link to your own self-published article is also likely to be edited out. If someone else were to do it, it might have more traction. No I'm not going to do it.

The Official Version is dead in the water unless your name is Dick Marquise or Kenny MacAskill, frankly. Editing alternative theories out of Wikipedia isn't going to save it, and anyone with half a brain knows this. While your pdf remains accessible, you are not being suppressed.

Rolfe.

 

[CharlesNorrie]

The reference I put in the Pan am Flight 103 conspiracy theories was


For a conspiracy theory that blames the US and Iranian governments jointly through their agencies the CIA and Pasdaran see adifferentviewonlockerbie.blogspot.com


It went within 30 minutes courtesy of Mr Bert Stossberg on the grounds of being "unnotable", not a word in my dictionary.

If you have a look at my theory, which you may not like, you will see that I have no less than 75 references in 30 pages of theory. Don't say you can't check my stuff. I've never seen a footnote in this blog,

Edited by Professor Yaffle: 

Edited for civility

 

[CharlesNorrie]

Since you had steadfastly refused to publish your theory until this week, then your theory was not in the public domain, therefore it was not part of the literature of "Lockerbie conspiracy theories" - which is what the page is about.

But it's there now and referenced Rolfe at adifferntviewonlockerbie.blogspot.com

I have never seen you ever produce a single reference in your work, so it stinks.

Again, please make it clear when you are quoting another person. If you are having trouble using the quote function, feel free to PM me for help, or make your quotes clear in another way, such as by using italics or a different colour and using the name of the person you are quoting. If you refuse to do so, escalating moderation action including suspension or banning may apply.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Professor Yaffle

 

[Rolfe]

"Unnotable" is a wiki editorial term for something too light-weight to include. It's as I suspected, you're a one-man-band on this, and you referencing your own publication isn't weighty enough for the encyclopaedia. You need to acquire a following and some credibility.

Good luck with that.

This isn't a blog, so you wouldn't expect foot-notes. Forum posts don't normally take that form. Nevertheless, posters here mostly reference their theories a lot better than you're doing with yours.

ETA: You have enough posts to post links now, Charles. You can include complete urls and they will automatically link.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I have never seen you ever produce a single reference in your work, so it stinks.

What work of mine would that be, then?

Maybe posts 1, 3 and 5 in this thread? http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=181471

Rolfe.

 

[CharlesNorrie]

Ambrosia, you've rather made a point for me. If the bomb were placed at such a point it did so much damage destroying the power systems and control cable harness, it could not have been put there by accident. The odds are rather against it. And by whatever route the bomb got onto the plane why did it get into a first-off container in the forehold. It is rather unlikely. The bag loaded at Luqa was nothing special, yet it went into AVE4041 PA, whivh either contained first class luggage (first class passengers to that most class ridden of all countries don't want to be delayed) or an interline container. Thank you. I'll put the point in my next revision. Next helpful criticism someone. Not you, Rolfe or sabretooth.

 

[CharlesNorrie]

Exactly Rolfe. Carping about trivialities is not work.Will you take yourself elsewhere.