Merged al Megrahi and the Lockerbie bombing

[Buncrana]

Yeah, you CT bully, with your deceptive so-called "legal rulings by an independent review body." The point Bunntams is trying to make, and it seems to slip by you, is he dropped that appeal they authorized, and the judges' ruling stands. Basis in reason or not, they decided that's when the sale happened and so it MIGHT have been Megrahi, despite no identification from Gauci or anyone. And so it was Megrahi, since blah blah blah, and that's all that matters. Guilty=guilty, her side wins, we lose, haha. Shows us bullies right.

Well of course Gadaffi's thug Megrahi the terrorist dropped the appeal. Sure, he doesn't want us to know the truth about his terrorist activities, bombs, millions of dollars and past transgressions...etc etc

So, yes indeedy, Megrahi dropped the appeal, denying us all the truth and has the temerity to usurp our democratic justice system. Dang, those pesky terrorists foil us again!

Well, how about we, through er, critical examination, bypass these unsatisfactory conditions seemingly dictated by the convicted terrorist and arrive at a conclusion we have been denied?

Our integrity of the democratic justice system and the deaths of 270 people are worth more than this.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Sorry, you've lost me. What do you mean by the highlighted portion?

You don't get how being hung up by your private parts has karmic consequences? No wonder .... someone else fill in those blanks, I'm not coming up with anything good.

Are you suggesting Rolfe is a bully? If so, I suggest you report the offending posts (assuming there are any; seems unlikely to me, from all the posts of hers that I've read.)

I second this. I'd rather see more reporting and less whining.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Well of course Gadaffi's thug Megrahi the terrorist dropped the appeal. Sure, he doesn't want us to know the truth about his terrorist activities, bombs, millions of dollars and past transgressions...etc etc

So, yes indeedy, Megrahi dropped the appeal, denying us all the truth and has the temerity to usurp our democratic justice system. Dang, those pesky terrorists foil us again!

Well, how about we, through er, critical examination, bypass these unsatisfactory conditions seemingly dictated by the convicted terrorist and arrive at a conclusion we have been denied?

Our integrity of the democratic justice system and the deaths of 270 people are worth more than this.

Mmm, somehow I don't think that's the desired solution. Sure, that was his clever escape from being proven REALLY guilty, but y'know, it's okay to let terrorists win sometimes.

 

[zooterkin]

You don't get how being hung up by your private parts has karmic consequences? No wonder .... someone else fill in those blanks, I'm not coming up with anything good.

Well, there's two parts I don't understand. First, is it alleged that Megrahi actually was hung up by his 'family jewels', or am I completely misunderstanding the remark? Secondly, if that's what is being alleged, surely any karma would be acting on the people who did it, not him?

 

[Rolfe]

This bit that was moved from the thread in SI&CE makes no sense in here. I very much doubt that Scrut will come into this forum area and argue his case, though.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

If you and/or CT would have bothered to look into the Gaddafi / Sennusi / Megrahi relationship (instead of hand waving it when I brought it up eons ago when I first joined JREF) in your "research" you might have noticed the issues and complicities here. But no, you're so hell bent on Megrahi's innocence, you accuse others of ignoring the facts and yet you ignore them yourselves. [....]

Megrahi was, is and forever will be a terrorist, aligned with Gaddaffi, via the same family tribe as Sennussi, who is in the same family as Gaddafi. Blood seems to be thick in the Libyan tribes and Megrahi's blood is intertwined with Gaddaffi's via his tribe being the same as Sennusi's.

That's all very well, Bunntamas, but it doesn't bear to the point at issue, which is whether the Lockerbie bomb travelled on KM180 that morning as unaccompanied baggage. If it did, then all that is relevant. If it didn't, then Megrahi was a thousand miles away from the scene of the crime when the crime happened.

I do not know whether Megrahi personally was involved in nothing more reprehensible than sanctions-busting and smuggling, with his worst crime being that he knew (and is related to) some serious bad guys, or whether he had a past that would shock Ivan the Terrible. I officially DO NOT CARE.

There are many bad guys in the world. Just being a bad guy, even being a very bad guy indeed, is not proof that an individual committed a particular crime. Look into the pasts of some of the other people who have been linked to the Lockerbie bombing. All a bunch if innocents? No I don't think so.

First, establish that there is specific evidence connecting the bad guy to the crime in question, before claiming that the mere fact that he is (or may be) a bad guy is relevant to the discussion.

If the bomb did not travel on KM180 that morning, Megrahi could not have committed the crime. There is no evidence AT ALL that the bomb travelled on KM180 that morning, and "considerable and quite compelling evidence" (that's a quote from one of the Zeist judges by the way) that it did not.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I know it has been said that we shouldn't care if Megrahi was wrongly convicted because he was a bad guy anyway. That is such an affront to justice I don't know where to start.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

Oh, "enlightened" CTers with your all knowingness about "evidence", do tell about your knowledge of "evidence" or lack thereof, surrounding Abdeljalil. And how this relates to your "arguments".

~B.

 

[zooterkin]

Oh, "enlightened" CTers with your all knowingness about "evidence", do tell about your knowledge of "evidence" or lack thereof, surrounding Abdeljalil. And how this relates to your "arguments".

What?

 

[Caustic Logic]

Oh, "enlightened" CTers with your all knowingness about "evidence", do tell about your knowledge of "evidence" or lack thereof, surrounding Abdeljalil. And how this relates to your "arguments".

~B.

Hmm... haven't we been trying to do just that for however many months now, only to get silence and drivel about clan affiliations?

Look, I'm not up for wasting time these days, but since you asked so nicely, I will briefly entertain your (sincere?) request to hear it again. But only in trade. You owe me an answer to Buncrana's post above. How do you support your inconsistent acceptance of Scottish legal decisions? You embrace without question or critical though the guilty verdict, and seem completely unaware of the official finding that the former might well have been a miscarriage of justice. Seems a bit FISHY, y'know. And consistently so.

I won't even wait for your half to come through, in good faith. Unfortunately, I don't know how to answer this:

knowledge of "evidence" or lack thereof, surrounding Abdeljalil

All I can say is I had never heard of him until the other day, and haven't had the time to learn anything aside from what we've discussed here. Justice Minister of Gaddafi's regime for some time until the protest/war thing, and then he suddenly came out with resigning in protest and this absurd claim of proof for a case that otherwise doesn't even have any credible evidence.

As for

how this relates to your "arguments"

I'm still not sure exactly what the "this" you refer to is, and I don't have any "arguments," only arguments.

As you know, we have many lines of qestioning, covered here in the last couple of years, with you here for some of it. Essentially, how this relates is about what I bolded above - it doesn't seem that Megrahi bombed that plane, so any claim of an order to do so is dubious at best. Is that so hard to grasp?

You're still having a hard part with "no credible evidence." Keeping it simple and to one point, and without re-explaining what we've already been over repeatedly, let's just look at one of the more central parts, the one the SCCRC focused on , the "identification" of Megrahi as the clothes buyer. As you're surely aware, Tony Gauci never identified Megrahi. Someone else did it for him, pretty much ignoring his testimony along the way.

As I recall, all you've said about Tony's contribution to the case was in reference to his 2000 testimony, where he contradicted himself in numerous ways to be less discrepant with Megrahi. As I recall, you praised his memory there as remarkably good for such a long time after the event. But still no word on how his memory improved so much, or why his recall of Megrahi visiting on December 7 came out so muddled in his 1989-91 police statements as to seem very much like a different man on a different day.

And you can't chalk it all up to bizarre memory problems. The umbrella testifying to the rain that was totally absent on December 7 was found in blasted bits across Scotland.

Rather than explain each of the points above for you, why not point out what you disagree with or need to see the work for, and I will provide that as time allows. So long as you hold up your end and let us know one good reason to simply ignore the SCCRC's findings as you have chosen to.

 

[Rolfe]

How do you support your inconsistent acceptance of Scottish legal decisions? You embrace without question or critical though the guilty verdict, and seem completely unaware of the official finding that the former might well have been a miscarriage of justice. Seems a bit FISHY, y'know. And consistently so.

Could I second that? Bear in mind that Fhimah was ACQUITTED by the Zeist court. And it was a "not guilty" too, not even a "not proven". (I bitterly oppose that dual verdict, but given that it exists, we can draw certain conclusions from that.) And yet Bunntamas repeatedly posts accusations that Fhimah was involved in bombing the plane.

How's that for selective application of the evidence?

And also, as you say, the SCCRC findings. Most accused would be ecstatically happy with one ground of appeal to be identified by the Commission. Megrahi had six. Here's a sample.

the Commission formed the view that there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgement for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988.

In the Commission’s view, [....] the purchase of the items took place prior to 6 December 1988 [....] at a time when there was no evidence at trial that the applicant was in Malta.

four days prior to the identification parade at which Mr Gauci picked out the applicant, he saw a photograph of the applicant in a
magazine article linking him to the bombing. In the Commission’s view evidence of Mr Gauci’s exposure to this photograph in such close proximity to the parade undermines the reliability of his identification of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself.

This report is the result of a four-year intensive inquiry into the evidence. The commission tasked with reporting on the safety of the conviction has concluded that it does not appear to be safe.

Anyone debating in good faith on the legal position has to acknowledge this. Bunntamas, are you prepared to take the SCCRC findings on board?

If we're going to return to the unreliability of Tony Gauci's identification, I think we should go back to the thread in question. But make no mistake, it's crucial. Tony never identified Megrahi as the buyer of the clothes. His original descriptions of the buyer are nothing like Megrahi. The photo he picked out of Megrahi is one which isn't actually recognisable as being a photo of Megrahi. By the time he got to Zeist, he had learned very well what the man n custody looked like, whom he was supposed to be identifying. The identity parade was a farce, with Megrahi being forced to wear red shoes while all the other men were wearing trainers. And even then all Tony could say was that Megrahi wasn't the buyer but resembled him.

It's important because if the identification falls, so does the rest of the case. There is no evidence Megrahi did anything out of the ordinary at Malta that morning - he didn't have a suitcase with him and he didn't go airside. There is no evidence there was any unaccompanied luggage on KM180, and "considerable and quite compelling evidence" that there wasn't. The x-ray operator at Frankfurt didn't see anything suspicious among the luggage transferred to PA103A at Frankfurt. There is literally not a shred of evidence to show that the bomb travelled on the route it is said to have travelled.

The only reason the judges decided that must have happened, despite the "considerable and quite compelling evidence" that it didn't, is that the man they had decoded bought the clothes from Tony Gauci was at the airport at Malta that morning.

If the identification falls, and in my opinion it should never have stood in the first place, the entire case falls.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

The above post was moved out of context from a different thread. I'm moving this one from the same thread because of course the question keeps coming up but we've been forbidden from talking about it there.

This is for Wildcat, and he might also like to read the post above. If it had stayed where it was originally posted he might not have had so many questions.

And so what if it was? How does that rule out Megrahi's involvement? Was this the one brick in the case which if removed the whole case comes crumbling down?

I'll try it this way. There was no evidence at all that the bomb was ever anywhere near Malta, or travelled on KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt. On the contrary, intensive and prolonged investigation ruled it out. Despite this, the court chose to decide that had actually happened, because they believed Megrahi (who had been at the airport catching another flight when KM180 left) was the man who had purchased the clothes identified as being in the suitcase with the bomb. This relied on identification evidence given by the shopkeeper who sold the clothes. Here's how that worked.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6920925

In addition, the date he appeared to be describing was a day on which Megrahi wasn't on Malta at all. This is one of the bits of circular reasoning. They first decide that the less likely day is the day when the clothes were bought, for no readily apparent reason, but in fact because that is the day that will allow them to find that the purchaser was Megrahi. They then decide that the shopkeeper's non-identification of Megrahi as the purchaser (he only said Megrahi resembled the purchaser) was a positive identification - because Megrahi had been on the island on the day in question, and because he had been at the airport when the bomb was undetectably smuggled on the plane.

Then they decided the bomb must have been on that plane even though there was no evidence to that effect, plenty evidence it wasn't, and plenty evidence it had been introduced at Heathrow - because the man who bought the clothes was at the airport when that flight left!

I'm not making this up, I wish I was.

There's a lot more, proven stuff about bribing witnesses and suppressing evidence, and suspected but unprovable fabrication of evidence. But really, if Megrahi didn't buy the clothes he didn't do it. It's that simple. And this is the what the official Scottish legal body which spent nearly four years looking into that said.

• The Commission formed the view that there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988.
• The purchase of the items took place prior to 6 December 1988. In other words, it indicates that the purchase took place at a time when there was no evidence at trial that the applicant was in Malta.
• Mr Gauci’s exposure to this photograph in such close proximity to the parade undermines the reliability of his identification of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself.

He didn't buy these clothes, and he was nowhere near when the bomb was introduced into the baggage container at London. There was no other evidence linking him to the bombing. All that can be appreciated by reading the Opinion of the Court. Which is why Damien Evans said that the evidence presented in the trial showed he couldn't have done it.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

Look, I'm not up for wasting time these days,

For not being up for wasting time, you sure do waste a lot of it here, on R. Black's and your blog with your CTs.

but since you asked so nicely, I will briefly entertain your (sincere?) request to hear it again. But only in trade. You owe me an answer

Edited by Tricky: 

Edited for civility.

Speaking of pictures, following is what the rest of the world (beyond CTers) are thinking about Libya and what you and yours view as the "innocent" arguments of Gaddaffi's clan and his henchmen, including Megrahi. I must say, a much better cartoon than yours.

http://www.bokbluster.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/110224boklores.jpg

Oh, the irony. If he doesn't croak first, it may just become a reality that Megrahi once again resides in a prison cell, where he belongs. along with his fellow terrorist bosses; Senussi and Gaddaffi (if Gaddafi doesn't first off himself on those drugs that he alleges were supplied by al qaeda, resulting in the Libyan uprising; the idea of which, (al qaeda suppliying drugs to Libyans, that is) uncannily resembles the CTing that has gone on here, for years on end, hence the relegation of all of these comments to the CT forum, much to Rolfe's chagrin, yet nontheless, as appropriate as Megrahi, et al, belonging in prison).

Cheers,
~B

 

[Caustic Logic]

[deleted]

You are so on ignore now. Ta-ta.

 

[little grey rabbit]

Timers for Libya

In week 7 of the trial, Meister testified that Mebo had supplied Libya with 20 MST-13 timing devices, and identified one of the two accused (Abdelbaset al-Megrahi) as a former business contact. The defence asked Meister, under cross-examination, to explain the purpose of his visit to Syria in 1984. Meister's partner, Edwin Bollier, was questioned in week 8. Bollier said Mebo made a range of products including briefcases equipped to radio-detonate IEDs. He agreed that Mebo had sold 20 MST-13 timers to Libya in 1985, which were later tested by Libyan special forces at their base at Sabha. Bollier said: "I was present when two such timers were included in bomb cylinders". In court, Bollier was shown a number of printed circuit board fragments which he identified as coming from the Mebo MST-13 timer, but he claimed that these timer fragments appeared to have been modified.
[edit] Timers for East Germany

Joachim Wenzel, an employee of the Stasi, the former East German intelligence agency, testified behind screens in week 9. Wenzel claimed to have been Bollier's handler in the years 1982-85 and testified that Mebo had supplied the Stasi with timers.[5]
[edit] Criminal complaint

During week 11 of the trial, Mebo lawyer Dieter Neupert filed an official criminal complaint against the Crown over what he alleged was a 'forged fragment of MST-13 timer'.[6]
[edit] False testimony

Former Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert, told the Scottish Court in the Netherlands that as an electronics engineer he had produced all of the firm's MST-13 timers. Lumpert agreed that the fragments shown to him in court "could be" from that timer and was asked to confirm his signature on a letter concerning a technical fault with the prototype MST-13 timer.

Seven years later, on 18 July 2007, Lumpert claimed he had lied at the trial.[7] In a sworn affidavit before a Zurich notary, Lumpert stated that he had stolen a prototype MST-13 timer PC-board from Mebo and that he had given it on 22 June 1989, to "an official person investigating the Lockerbie case".[8] Dr Hans Köchler, UN observer at the Lockerbie trial, was sent a copy of Lumpert's affidavit and issued a report on the matter.[9] Dr Köchler told the Glasgow Herald:

"The Scottish authorities are now obliged to investigate this situation. Not only has Mr Lumpert admitted to stealing a sample of the timer, but to the fact he gave it to an official and then lied in court".

So if the detonator isn't genuine (and if I recall correctly it was found very late and wrapted up in Tony's famous shirt) then we don't have a clue what brought down the plane.

We don't even know if it was a bomb.

 

[Caustic Logic]

So if the detonator isn't genuine (and if I recall correctly it was found very late and wrapted up in Tony's famous shirt) then we don't have a clue what brought down the plane.

We don't even know if it was a bomb.

Yeah, we do, barring an insane no-planer-level conspiracy. The physical science is around, photos, etc. You should find little if anything amiss with it.

The detonation time happens to match perfectly with a Khreesat bomb loaded at London, commissioned by the Iranians, with one missing and no Iranian revenge for IR 655 unless that was it. London's security was severely breached, of all days, on Dec 21 1988. And a case of the bomb style was reported in the same corner of the luggage container blown outward by the bomb. The time it was seen clarifies this something other than the Libyan brown Samsonite, which magiically replaced the "Bedford suitcase" and did the bombing, with inexplcable timing from a non-Khreesat-bomb perspective.

So yeah, there is good reason to speculate just the type of bomb used and it didn't have a MST-13 in it. And as such, didnt't have those disinfo jabberjaws at Mebo attached, until the planted evidence brought them in. Don't buy anything they say. Bollier was the first one to suggest the CIA should frame Libya and pay for his help doing so. The Mebo files.

 

[little grey rabbit]

If true he should go to jail also. Although to be honest I find it doubtful he could have initiated such a plan, all he could do was assist once requested.

But at least his evidence is consistant. All Bollier can tell us is what didn't happen. If he didn't supply the timer and the timer used in evidence was fabricated by his employees at the request of the British police that is the information he can usefully provide.

You provide no reasonable motive about why Britain should wish to protect Iran (and no oil is not a reasonable motive)

 

[Rolfe]

Ever heard of the "special relationship"?

Though at bottom, I don't think the UK cared who got the blame so long as there was no finding that the bomb had been introduced at Heathrow airport.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

[deleted]

You are so on ignore now. Ta-ta.

Finally!

 

[Bunntamas]

Ever heard of the "special relationship"?

A whole lot of "special relashioships" are being revealed, now that Gaddaffi's grip has been removed from the Libyans' throats.

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/231536/Revealed-The-truth-behind-Pan-Am-103/