Merged al Megrahi and the Lockerbie bombing

[Rolfe]

I thought it was good too. The ending seemed as if they really, really wanted to have debunked the conspiracies but realised they couldn't do it.

However, remember this is the BBC. They're not as independent as all that. And this was post Gilligan. Do Not Rock The Boat. It's a known fact that the UK government does not want certain things about this affair to come to light, so I wouldn't necessarily expect a BBC programme to adopt a completely open-minded approach.

The Frankfurt baggage thing was quite bad, actually. If it had been as they said, that an unaccompanied bag had really definitely come through from Luqa on KM180, then that would have been a huge pointer to shenanigans at Luqa that day, which is where Megrahi was. But that wasn't the case at all, and was known not to be the case. Paul Foot's account was dated 2001, and took its material directly from the Camp Zeist evidence - all of that was available to the production team, but they chose not to use it in favour of a very simplified and positively misleading account.

This was either very sloppy reporting/editing, or it was deliberate slanting of the evidence to make it look a lot clear cut than it really was.

In contrast, have you looked at the three Al Jazeera films on the subject? (OK, two-and-a-bit.) I was struck by the willingness to go places the BBC seemed to be shying away from. Though I admit all the films (four different productions, if you count the Al Jazeera material as just one) are beginning to get conflated in my head now.

Rolfe.

 

[Ambrosia]

Are you including Gideon Levys "Lockerbie Revisited" which is in Dutch, but the interviews in it are all English?

 

[Rolfe]

No, haven't seen that one. Do you have a link?

I was including The Maltese Double Cross, Lockerbie and the CIA, The Conspiracy Files and Flight into Darkness (and its follow-ups).

Rolfe.

 

[Ambrosia]

Lockerbie Revisited

 

[Caustic Logic]

However, remember this is the BBC. They're not as independent as all that. <snip>
The Frankfurt baggage thing was quite bad, actually. If it had been as they said, that an unaccompanied bag had really definitely come through from Luqa on KM180, then that would have been a huge pointer to shenanigans at Luqa that day, which is where Megrahi was.
<snip>
This was either very sloppy reporting/editing, or it was deliberate slanting of the evidence to make it look a lot clear cut than it really was.

The coincidence this sloppiness comes down supporting the government line is too much to ignore. This wrongly-framed piece of evidence is not questioned anything like Giaka, and it's the first point on the line that points to the video's end where they get all indignant about Ghaddafi the appeal.

In contrast, have you looked at the three Al Jazeera films on the subject? (OK, two-and-a-bit.) I was struck by the willingness to go places the BBC seemed to be shying away from. Though I admit all the films (four different productions, if you count the Al Jazeera material as just one) are beginning to get conflated in my head now.

I will check them out, but not yet. I hope they're good and fact-based without too much over-the-top woo. I could see that happening and shoot themselves in the foot. My head's not crowded enough just yet to get too conflated but I'm sure I'll get there.

Ambbrosia, excellent observations. Thanks.

near the end the narrator says "one fact was hard to explain away" and in the next breath explains it away.

The hard question is basically "why did they "admit responsibility but not guilt" and pay up IF they weren't guilty?" They didn't answer it fairly there, just conveyed the Libyan line with incredulity. How they framed this was so piss poor. "playing with words" = "cynical game" = "blood money"

 

[Rolfe]

The Al Jazeera film isn't woo. It interviews some very credible people.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Lockerbie Revisited

OK, officially wow. It's frustrating only understanding about two thirds of it, but I got the message. It's recent, too - only last year, clearly. By the way, take it from me, don't trust Peter Fraser as far as you can throw him. The only one I'd trust less would be Colin Boyd.

The theory they're putting forward in the first part is the one I've been sort of toying with, based on a few things I read.

Khreesat was released by the German police remarkably fast, even though normal people might think there was a ton of evidence against him. One source I read said he made a single telephone call, and then he was released. Did I just hear Marquise confirm that? Something about him working for Jordan, so they let him go?

The other source I read suggested that his bombs were supposed to be dummy ones - but later, one of them killed a German bomb disposal expert. The suggestion was that he was a triple agent - allowing the CIA to believe he was working for them, but working for the PFLP-GC all along.

So he and a couple of others were released, in order to protect them as sources and keep their intelligence coming. Either in the genuine belief that they weren't going to bomb anyone for real anyway, or taking the chance because they were too important/useful to sacrifice.

Then they successfully blew up PA103, and it was realised that the release had been a huge mistake. Maybe it was even realised that a bombing was possible, hence all the warnings flying around, but it was a risk that was taken for intelligence reasons.

A few weeks into the investigation, and it's realised the police are getting there, and there is a very embarrassing place. Not to mention too sensitive to reveal, for intelligence reasons. So the backtracking and the soft-pedalling start.

I have no idea how that scenario fits in with the CIA operatives on the pkane, or the drugs, or the alleged missing body. I have no idea whether the CIA were on the scene so fast to conceal things the plane might have been carrying (relating to the passengers), or to find out if it was indeed Khreesat's work and misdirect if it was.

In fact I'm totally guessing, but that's the one I tend to keep coming back to.

The chain of custody of that timer fragment stinks to high heaven. Thurman says he had it in America. Others say no, it never went there. In fact they're very very definite about it. That cop Henderson is extremely definite. Quite a little row they had about it.

Oh, I dunno. Time for bed, really. But what an interesting film!

Rolfe.

 

[Bobby]

Not sure if you've seen the latest from Private Eye, here and here. Nothing new in there, but an interesting recap nonetheless.

 

[Rolfe]

Thanks a lot!

Rolfe.

 

[Bobby]

An interview with the Britsh PM is available for download here until 9/30. Around the 26 minute mark he provides a brief summary of the UK gov't stand on the issue of Megrahi's guilt.

 

[Rolfe]

I ain't bothering with that, but if Gordon Brown told me it was a nice day out there, I'd go check for myself.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Just thought I'd put these slightly off-topic musings in this thread.

I was born and brought up about 50 miles from Lockerbie. I didn't know the town well (though I did canvass parts of it for the 1999 Scottish election), but as it's on the main route to England I was always aware of it. More so from 1982 when I moved to England, and travelled home by train many times. Lockerbie was (and probably is) one of the stops on the main London Euston to Glasgow Central west coast route, on the stopping trains I favoured to allow me to get out at my own intermediate station.

I remember exactly where I was on the evening of 21st December 1988 when I heard the news. I'd been watching the 7pm Channel 4 news broadcast, and the broadcast was just finishing a few minutes before 8 o'clock. As the programme came to its end I stood up to go to the kitchen for something (probably clearing my dirty crockery). Instead of finishing, however, the announcer began to read a news flash about a plane having crashed on Lockerbie.

I remember standing in the doorway of my living room, listening to the horrific news (pictures didn't come till later), simply rooted to the spot. (At that time the reports were a bit inaccurate, for example they said there was a report that the nearby village of Tundergarth was in flames, but that turned out not to be true. Also not true was that people driving on the A74 road which skirts the town had been killed.)

There was no such thing as 24-hour news channels then, or none that I could access, but I watched the BBC 9 o'clock news then the ITV News at Ten, and it just got worse and worse. The later reports had some video footage showing flames roaring into the night sky.

Next day they started showing daylight pictures of the wreckage and the smouldering hole that was Sherwood Crescent. It began to be obvious that the passengers must have been aware of what was happening when the plane blew apart, and that some were probably conscious for at least part of the fall from 34,000 feet up. Possibly nobody was killed in the air, everybody was killed by impacting the ground at terminal velocity.

Later, the awful story of the family the engines landed on became public. They were all killed apart from a teenage boy who'd gone to a neighbour's house to mend his bike, as the neighbour had an electric light in his garage. I think there was also an older son who wasn't living at home. The subsequent history of these young men was appalling, ending in suicide.

At the time, I selfishly began to wonder how I was going to get home for Christmas. I was intending to drive up to Scotland only 48 hours later, and the only road I knew was the A74, on which bits of plane had fallen. I recall a long journey with a lot of hold-ups, but it wasn't actually as bad as I expected. I remember looking to my right as I finally passed Lockerbie, but it was pitch dark and there was nothing to see. If Sherwood Crescent was still burning, or if there was a pall of smoke hanging over the town, I didn't see it.

Over Christmas and New Year there wasn't much else on the news. It just got worse and worse, as the news about the local people killed on the ground emerged, and people started talking about a bomb. We weren't used to that, because the IRA had never targeted Scotland, and it was all so close to home.

Before I left to return to England on 2nd January I fished out a large-scale Ordnance Survey map and plotted a route to avoid the A74. I did that in daylight, which was just as well as it involved unmade farm roads and forest tracks. I remember looking across at the stationary lines of traffic on the main road, much of which was still coned off. Again, the journey took a while, and it was late before I got back to England.

The incident has been in the news almost constantly ever since, what with anniversaries, and news about the tragedy of the boy who was mending his bike, and news releases about the investigation. I don't remember when people started talking about a cover-up. There was muttering when the investigation suddenly switched from Iran/Syria to Libya, and the original indictment against the Libyans, but we were assured the authorities had "incontrovertible evidence" of their guilt so nobody really went digging. It all went quiet for ten years, with just the occasional article about the failure to extradite the accused - and the anniversaries, and the developing news about how the town was recovering (or not recovering in certain cases).

In 1999 when I was doing the political canvassing, nobody was talking about it. It wasn't the sort of thing a stranger was going to raise in conversation. However, one of my fellow-canvassers who was from Dumfries passed on some accounts she'd had at the time, from people who'd been in the town centre doing late Christmas shopping and thought the sky was falling in, and didn't know if whatever it was had hit their own homes and their own families or not.

It wasn't till Camp Zeist that the "conspiracy theories" really started to circulate, fuelled by the manifestly threadbare nature of the evidence we'd all been told was so incontrovertible, and the bits of the "special defence of incrimination" that got through to the court. Journalists started remembering how in 1989 and 1990 we were all being told that it was the work a Palestinian group, and dug out the old articles which made a lot more sense than the Libyan tale, and there we are.

Rolfe.

 

[realdon]

I found this. 450 pages of FOIA DIA documents relating to PanAm 103
available to the public on the DIA website

They are not in chronological order but the dates are prefixed by IRDT, DOI or ACQ
They contain lots of "Black holes"

Bear in mind they are information reports and not finally evaluated.
They were at the time of release NOFORN Not for Foreign nationals (to view)
WNINTEL Warning Notice -- Intelligence Sources & Methods Involved


www@dia@mil/foia/panam103@pdf (substitute the @)

Interesting finds so far ( Pdf page no's)
P3 Nov 91 para 1.A
P6 Post desert storm ? Para 4
P111 Sept 89 Wrong aircraft , Jabril and Libya
P115 Iran,Libya and Syria co operation
P138 Nov 91 Jabril and Libya, Megrahi and others Timer set in london
P156,159,163 First reports
218 Nov 91 "Libyans still sweatin"
252 DIA Brief

Lots of stuff to suggest that Libya and Gaddafi were the fall guys in this affair and Gaddafi shot himself in the foot getting into bed with Iran who insulated themselves against blame for Pan Am 103. But got vengance for the Airbus downing in the gulf.

Gaddafi speaking at the UN and being able to pitch his tent on US soil in the last few weeks looks like he has managed to scramble out of the hole he dug

David

 

[realdon]

Sorry link is

www.dia.mil/Foia/panam103.pdf

cant post links yet so substitute @ with .

David

Edited by Professor Yaffle: 

Fixed your link for you

 

[Caustic Logic]

Lots of stuff to suggest that Libya and Gaddafi were the fall guys in this affair and Gaddafi shot himself in the foot getting into bed with Iran who insulated themselves against blame for Pan Am 103. But got vengance for the Airbus downing in the gulf.

Gaddafi speaking at the UN and being able to pitch his tent on US soil in the last few weeks looks like he has managed to scramble out of the hole he dug

David

Wow, this sure sounds like amazing stuff. I've got it open now but dang, no time to really get in. More stupid real world stuff. I'll check it out later, thanks for the tip! If it's got black it's in the know and fit for info scavenging...

 

[Ambrosia]

yay another 450 pages of reading...

thanks for the link

As Richard Marquise is fond of pointing out: "Intelligence is not evidence"

With that in mind below are excerpts from the DIA Briefing December 1989. Presumably the contents of said briefing are based on mostly evaluated intelligence reports, being a year after the disaster [pg 252 -255 of the pdf linked to above] (emphasis mine)

Iran probably was the state sponsor for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) attack on Pan Am 103. ... The PFLP-GC possesses a demonstrated technical expertise, operational experience, and organizational stability not enjoyed by other rejectionist Palestinian terrorist groups. Iran found these qualities attractive and sought to exploit them. The PFLP-GC is fast becoming an Iranian proxy. Destroying Pan Am 103 to avenge the July 1988 US shootdown of an Iran Air airbus may represent the result of such Iranian/PFLP-GC cooperation. ...

Pan Am flight 103 exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988
as a result of a sophisticated, barometrically-triggered explosive device probably fabricated by the PFLP-GC. ...
Electronic fragments found in the wreckage revealed the bomb was concealed
inside a Toshiba radio/cassette player. DIA believes the device was placed aboard Pan
Am 103 in Frankfurt, West Germany. ...

Following a tip concerning an imminent terrorist attack, West German
authorities uncovered an extensive PFLP-GC terrorist cell in fall 1988. Subsequent analysis of materiel confiscated from this PFLP-GC cell has provided strong circumstantial evidence linking the cell to the bombing.
...

Additionally, the PFLP-GC may have been motivated [apart from the already noted in the report Iranian Airbus shooting] to target US interests to discredit
Arafat and his November 1988 initiative to open a Palestinian-US dialogue out of anger with Arafat's moderation and conciliatory entreaties toward Israel. Specifically, the PLO's renunciation of terrorism and willingness to negotiate a settlement with Israel probably heightened the threat from rejectionist Palestinian groups, such as the PFLP-GC, to conduct terrorist operations against US, Israeli, and pro-Arafat targets.
...

DIA continues to discount Libyan or Syrian involvement in the bombing of PanAm 103 because there is no current credible intelligence implicating either. Although Libya provides financial suport to the PFLP-GC and traditionally seeks to discredit Arafat, these factors probably are not suffcient motive for Qadhafi to undertake such a spectacular terrorist attack against US interests. In fact ... Qadhafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks. He probably fears another retaliatory bombing by the US; in particular a raid on the chemical facility at Rabta.

 

[Ambrosia]

excerpts from pg 296/297 intelligence summary dated March 1991.

This document has been scanned wonkily and some of the text from the left hand edge is missing, red text indicates letters I have added that do not appear in the original document in an effort to make it make sense. (emphasis mine)

Results of Lockerbie investigation may become public.
The Lord Advocate of scotland, Peter Fraser disclosed on 12 March that he may make public the criminal investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103 by 21 December 91 (the third anniversary of the incident). Fraser stated that if the deadline has been reached and he is satisfied that the investigation has progressed as far as possible, he will reveal the "whole story of the hunt for the bombers of Pan Am 103."

...

Lord Fraser's remarks should be taken seriously.
It has been expected that if reports from the Lockerbie task force are insufficient to bring anyone to trial, Fraser would discuss closing down the investigation with Chief Constable Esson. There is no doubt that a considerable amount of political pressure is being felt by Lord Fraser to bring the case to resolution as quickly as possible.
Even the American relatives of victims group has publicly endorsed Fraser's statements.

... Serious repercussions will be felt if Fraser closes[?] the case and divulges information derived from the criminal investigation. The disclosure of much of the information possessed by Fraser could seriously jeopardize U.S. prosecutive efforts.

Various intelligence and police activities, sources, and methods - as well as the identities of Investigators and suspects - may become public. Should this type of information be disclosed, it could have a negative impact on future relations among the various intelligence and police organizations involved with respect to the sharing of sensitive foreign intelligence and police information.

Indictments were made against Megrahi and Fhima 13th November 1991 in Scotland and the following day in the US. One month, one week, and one day before Lord Frasers deadline referred to in this intel report.

 

[realdon]

Interesting snippet from P111 dated 24th Sept 89

"The misson was to blow up a Pan Am flight that was to be almost entirely booked by military personnel on Christmas leave. The flight was supposed to be a direct flight from Frankfurt, GE to New york, not Pan Am flight 103 which was routed through London.UK. The suitcase containing the bomb was labled with the name of one of the US passengers on the plane and was inadvertantly placed on the wrong plane possibly by airport ground crew members in Frankfurt. The terrorist who last handled the bomb was not a passenger on the plane"


Well according to net searches there was an earlier flight out of Frankfurt direct to New york that day, Pan AM 67. If the 103 bomb had been aboard this flight it would have detonated well over the Atlantic and we would be unlikely to be discussing this now.


Also note that a whole swathe of stuff has been blacked out on pages 12 - 18 all relating to Libya and originating from Frankfurt

David

 

[Rolfe]

I'm losing count of the number of theories. Is that the sixth distinct one?

• Jibril and the PFLP-GC
• Libya/Gadaffi
• MIHOP to get rid of McKee
• MIHOP to get rid of the South African guy (sorry, past my bedtime)
• Accidental detonation for illegally-transported ordnance
• and now Wrong Plane

Yes, that's six.

I already saw that document in the pdf, someone linked to it earlier. I didn't realise it was so long though.

There's so much information available now it's hard to keep track of what's been said, and how many documents there are. I haven't even read the entire AAIB report yet. And I've not got through much of The Trail of the Octopus either.

Some things just get more peculiar the longer you look at them, like that surreal clothes purchase in Malta. I don't know whether the real answer's something that hasn't been suggested yet (or has received little attention), or whether to stick with the obvious (Jibril).

I don't even know if the timer fragment was planted or not.

I'm going to bed.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

The wrong plane story's got a strong feel to it, worth looking at. However... what about the Heathrow break-in and the timing coincidence based on that? How does this scenario fit in with barometer/timer settings to blow as it did? Etc?