Ever since his motivations report was published (courtesy of PMF), it's been glaringly obvious that there was some desperately bad reasoning made in Massei's court, coupled with some equally bad judicial rulings. I wasn't following this case at the time of the first trial, but it didn't take me long after I started following it (in March 2010 - before I'd even known the Massei Report was available) for me to work out the numerous significant flaws in the guilty verdicts.
I haven't read it, but I have read the Opinion of the Court on the Megrahi/Fhimah trial at Camp Zeist. I think I know what you mean. You read it, and you think, how can any human being with even average intellectual capacity reason like that? Never mind three of them.
The over-riding tenor of that lot was a single-minded determination to convict, much as you describe for the Massei document. If it was even
faintly possible that an interpretation could be put on the evidence that supported guilt, that interpretation was chosen, no matter how fanciful. At the same time, far more probable and reasonable explanations which supported innocence were rejected with - well, that hasn't been
proven.
The crowning glory was the circular reasoning. Megrahi was said to bear some resemblance to a man who bought certain clothes, if you ignored a heap of stuff about height, age, build, skin colour and the day the purchase happened. This from a witness who had seen the purchaser once, for about half an hour, over two years previously (for a bad photo) and then over ten years previously (for the ID parade). The judges solemnly declared that the witness's uncertainty was a positive sign, because it showed he was really trying to be fair - they actually said that sometimes a witness who wasn't sure was a more reliable identification than one who was sure. So they elevated this into "beyond reasonable doubt" that Megrahi had bought those clothes - because he was at the airport when the bomb was smuggled on to the plane, and that was surely no coincidence.
But then, when addressing the problem that there was absolutely no evidence that the bomb had ever been anywhere near that particular plane, and in fact this was investigated so minutely that it pretty much added up to evidence of absence, they did the opposite. They took the one single tenuous piece of evidence that might have pointed to an unaccompanied item on that plane (if only that hadn't been disproved at the other end), but which could well have had other explanations, and decided that this was indeed evidence the bomb was on that plane - because the man who had bought the clothes was at the airport at the time that flight left, and that was surely no coincidence!
They then looked straight at the very compelling evidence that the bomb had been introduced somewhere else entirely, constructed their very own fairy-story to hand-wave away that solid eyewitness evidence, and decided
that was the coincidence.
Guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Life imprisonment.
Why did they do this? I just totally don't
begin to get it. And I don't suppose anyone is going to hold three Lords to account for that
sacrificium intellectuale as it has been termed. But I'd dearly love to know why they did it.
So, since I probably won't wade my way through the whole Massei report, can you summarise the flaws as you see them, in roughly the same way?
Rolfe.
