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Fresh appeal applied for in the Lockerbie case

Interesting post on Bob Black's blog this morning. Megrahi petition on Justice Committee agenda.

The public petition (calling for an independent inquiry into the case) set up by Justice for Megrahi has been in front of the Justice Committee for aeons. The committee have repeatedly expressed displeasure with the way the Justice Department and the Crown Office are dealing with the matter as a whole, and seem to be keeping the petition open as a way of trying to keep them honest. (The convener of the Justice Committee is a member of JFM, but nobody seems to think that's a problem.)

The petition is again up for reconsideration on Tuesday of next week. The secretary of JFM has taken the opportunity to have another pop at the Crown Office and the Lord Advocate for the prejudicial public pronouncements made on 20th December. "Investigators [have] confirmed beyond doubt that the Libyan was the man responsible for the deaths of 270 people on December 21, 1988 [....] there is “not a shred of evidence” to support claims that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was wrongly convicted."

It is quite clear that yet again these authorities, despite being aware of the ongoing police enquiry, are publicly stating that they have no doubts about the guilt of Mr Megrahi and that any who do not share that view are conspiracy theorists.

In making these statements it seems to JFM that the Crown Office and Lord Advocate have effectively prejudged the police enquiry, dismissed the criminal investigation as irrelevant and severely compromised that investigation.

Given that this is the Crown’s second public rejection of our allegations we cannot see how we, the Justice Committee or public can have any confidence that when the police report is delivered to the Crown Office and Lord Advocate it will be dealt with in a fair and objective manner.

The Lord Advocate, as Scotland’s independent prosecutor in the public interest and a member of the Scottish Government, has severely compromised his constitutional position by making these comments when the enquiry is going on.
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It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Frank Mulholland is painting himself into a corner here. He seems to be announcing in public what he would like the criminal investigation to decide, before it has concluded its investigations. His statements are grossly misleading and indeed false, and the fact that they're being reported by Magnus Linklater whom he seems to have in his pocket doesn't give him much wiggle-room.

I'm not sure what the Justice Committee can actually do about it though. A reshuffle that sacked Mulholland and appointed someone with actual principles beyond covering the Crown Office's backside would be a better bet. (*Goes off to send Nicola a wee present.*)
 
How long have you got?

"The Scottish government does not doubt the safety of the conviction."

David Torrance, Salmond's biographer, says he believes Salmond genuinely thinks Megrahi is guilty. I could see that being possible, because he would have taken his briefings from the Crown Office and we all know what the Crown Office would be saying about it. However, Salmond has said that Torrance, whose biography was unofficial, "doesn't know me at all". On the other hand, people within the SNP have privately told me they know for a fact that both Salmond and MacAskill (both no longer in position of course) know perfectly well that he's innocent. I can't say how reliable this information is.

Pretty much everybody with whom I have struck up a conversation seems to take the knee-jerk position that Megrahi was set up, almost always without knowing anything much about the details of the case. It's my impression that many or most SNP party members at rank and file level believe the conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

The SNP, as a political party, of course has no position on the matter at all. I did however buy my first book about the case on a stall at an SNP conference about 14 years ago. An SNP member published the book with a nationalist small-press publisher.

There is a high level of suspicion within and outwith the SNP that Salmond and MacAskill were subject to outside pressures to support the conviction. I have no idea if that's true or not.
 
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Anglo, on a scale of 1 to 10, how unprofessional is Mulholland's behaviour?

In September of 2012, JFM wrote to the Justice Secretary giving only basic outlines of six allegations of criminality we intended to lodge against people involved in the Lockerbie investigation and subsequent trial, and inquired from him what the correct procedure was and to whom should these allegations be submitted. Mulholland immediately went to the press and denounced the allegations as deliberate lies, malicious, and wholly defamatory. That's nearly a quote, though I don't have it in front of me. We didn't actually submit the allegations until November. He hadn't read them when he went to the press.

He followed this up with a number of other misleading press statements, including one where his tame journalist said that independent counsel had been commissioned to assess the safety of the conviction and had reported that it was sound. This was presented in such a way as to imply that the assessment was specifically in relation to the allegations JFM had made in 2012. In fact, when pressed, the Crown Office was forced to admit that the reference was to an assessment made in 2007 for the previous Lord Advocate Eilish Angiolini, at the time Megrahi's second appeal was coming to court. It had nothing to do with the JFM applications, although the Crown Office represented it to the press as being a refutation of the allegations.

It is a fact that the first SCCRC investigation in 2004-07 found six grounds on which it believed the applicant might have suffered a miscarriage of justice, and gave leave to appeal. These grounds were never tested in court, because Megrahi abandoned that appeal to improve his prospects of being allowed to go home to die.

It is a fact that nine (we added three more) specific allegations of criminal misconduct have been made to the police against people involved in the original investigation and the 2000-01 trial. These are currently the subject of a major police inquiry which has yet to report. (And they contain material which is absolutely exculpatory to Megrahi, by the way.)

It is a fact that a formal application has been made to the SCCRC for leave to mount a third appeal against the conviction, and the commission is still in the early stages of dealing with this application.

That the Lord Advocate should run to the press with prejudicial (and in fact defamatory) statements demonstrating that his mind is entirely closed on the issue, is a bit of a facer to me. I thought they were supposed to hide the prejudice and put on a public façade of impartiality.
 
SOP for a political figure with reputations at stake. I cannot think myself into his shoes because I am only a lawyer. Law and politics are a difficult mix. Look at poor old Lord Goldsmith. He was asked to advise on the lawfulness of war in Iraq in light of the wording of a particular UN resolution. He gave equivocal, lengthy and considered advice that was not what the government wanted to hear. The government shrugged and went to work to get a second resolution that would remove any doubt. They encountered the French veto. Goldsmith was flown to Washington and spoken to, no doubt impressed with some red carpet treatment and the awesome enormity of the issue, and at the same time the government got an ultimatum from the army saying they needed legal cover before they would fight. So Goldsmith settled a second, much shorter opinion, which said the war would be fine (note: nothing material had changed since the earlier opinion) and this was shown to parliament (which did not know about the earlier advice).

60 barristers (not the most revolutionary body in the kingdom) complained to the Bar Council about Goldsmith's unprofessional conduct but the Bar Council (not the most courageous or principled body n the kingdom) decided that it was prohibited on constitutional grounds from looking into the matter.

Beat that!
 
Though of course your example is specifically constitutional. My case is on the face of it purely a criminal justice matter. Technically, this is simply a murder conviction under Scots law, and it is being contested on factual grounds. For the Lord Advocate to make such prejudicial statements is astonishing. Imagine if he were to be saying the same thing about the David Gilroy appeal, which is at much the same stage in the process at the moment!

He's treating a simple murder conviction as if it were a constitutional issue. Which it probably is, and that's interesting too.
 
Rolfe said:
Though of course your example is specifically constitutional. My case is on the face of it purely a criminal justice matter. Technically, this is simply a murder conviction under Scots law, and it is being contested on factual grounds. For the Lord Advocate to make such prejudicial statements is astonishing. Imagine if he were to be saying the same thing about the David Gilroy appeal, which is at much the same stage in the process at the moment!

He's treating a simple murder conviction as if it were a constitutional issue. Which it probably is, and that's interesting too.
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In some sense, although it is better that you guys don't think this way but just keep ploughing on, it is a little disingenuous or, if not that, simplistic, to characterise this as just a murder case. Like Iraq, it has and has had a major international dimension that goes far beyond narrow questions of guilt. But, as I said, its best to ignore that and just plough on.
 
There's no doubt that the massive ramifications are what's driving the Crown Office reaction. Not just international either. At its most basic, the biggest murder hunt ever mounted in Scotland was off the rails from the very beginning (more accurately, it was never on the rails in the first place), pursued a red herring down a blind alley in flagrant disregard for valid clues that were practically waving themselves in its face, and railroaded an innocent man.

When you consider how much time and money was spent on the original investigation, that's a shocker. When you consider how much time and money was spent on the trial of the first instance, it's another shocker. And when you consider that in the course of that trial the Crown concealed many items of exculpatory evidence from the defence, and then ran a false scenario it almost certainly knew was false in order to achieve the conviction - hell, you don't even need international ramifications to see why they're crapping themselves.
 
anglolawyer said:
In some sense, although it is better that you guys don't think this way but just keep ploughing on, it is a little disingenuous or, if not that, simplistic, to characterise this as just a murder case. Like Iraq, it has and has had a major international dimension that goes far beyond narrow questions of guilt. But, as I said, its best to ignore that and just plough on.
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I'm glad the new appeal has been submitted, and greatly hope it gets all the way to the Court of Appeal - there are beyond doubt things which need to be re-examined and reevaluated.

Maybe I should be whispering this, but isn't it possible that Megrahi (and maybe also Fhimah) might have been involved in conspiracy to plan the bombing, yet not involved in the actual execution of the act? I believe there's decent evidence that there was a "grand meeting" of like-minded parties in Malta in 1988, at which Mehrahi and Fhimah may have been present alongside representatives of PFLP-GC, the Syrians and the Iranians. If such a meeting did take place, then isn't it possible that Libya - via Megrahi and Fhimah - agreed to supply input and some materials, including the timer? If so, this would explain the provenance of the circuit board fragment - it is, after all, a pretty big step to accuse to US (presumably with UK complicity) to have willfully planted this evidence.

I just wonder whether the actual truth might lie somewhere in the middle here. I wonder if Megrahi might actually have borne some guilt for the planning of the attack and the design of the device (and perhaps the purchasing of the clothes), yet might have had nothing whatsoever to do with the construction of the bomb and its planting on the aircraft (I think it's immensely persuasive that the bomb was planted at LHR).
 
PS: the above might also place into a more understandable context the way in which the investigation suddenly switched to Libya. If Megrahi (and maybe Fhimah) was indeed involved in the way in which I suggest - and if therefore the timer circuit board fragment and clothes were actually reliable pointers to Megrahi's (and thus Libya's) involvement - then this would have been something of a godsend to US and UK investigators. After all, the political situation of the day meant that it would have been inconvenient (at best) to have been pointing the finger at Iran or even the Palestinians. By contrast, they were (as we all know) more than happy to blame Libya, which was at that time an international pariah, but one with which the US and UK were very keen to make industrial inroads.

In other words, perhaps Libya DID deserve some of the blame, but it ended up bearing all of the blame since this was the optimum political solution for the US and UK. I hope perhaps the full story comes out in time.......
 
John, I don't believe there's any reliable evidence for the meeting you mention.

Also, metallurgical analysis proves that the timer fragment, whether or not it was in any way part of the IED that brought down Pan Am 103, was not one of those sold to Libya. So there's no link there.

And Megrahi most certainly did not buy the clothes from Mary's House - the findings of the SCCRC underline that point. The evidence (some of it uncovered since the original trial, some of it known at the time by the Crown but withheld from the defence) shows clearly that the clothes were purchased on a day Megrahi was not on Malta.
 
Hi Pete, long time no see. Hope you stick around this time.

It would be nice if people presented evidence for wild assertions, or even tried to get up to speed on the case before pontificating, don't you think? As you say, anyone still trying to assert that Megrahi bought those clothes after all that's been written and uncovered, has a pretty uphill struggle on their hands.
 
The problem with the timer fragment - an amalgam of production and custom work, with some characteristics that make no sense for either - is that it defies a coherent explanation, not just of who might have used or planted it, but what it even is. A truthful investigator must admit to being stumped. That, unfortunately, can be construed as a vague conspiracy theory in which "something else happened," but no one knows what.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
The problem with the timer fragment - an amalgam of production and custom work, with some characteristics that make no sense for either - is that it defies a coherent explanation, not just of who might have used or planted it, but what it even is. A truthful investigator must admit to being stumped. That, unfortunately, can be construed as a vague conspiracy theory in which "something else happened," but no one knows what.
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As a onetime electronics manufacturing engineer, I agree. The fragment and it's apparent assembly methods do not appear to match the timer lot supplied to Libya.
 
anglolawyer said:
SOP for a political figure with reputations at stake. I cannot think myself into his shoes because I am only a lawyer. Law and politics are a difficult mix. Look at poor old Lord Goldsmith. He was asked to advise on the lawfulness of war in Iraq in light of the wording of a particular UN resolution. He gave equivocal, lengthy and considered advice that was not what the government wanted to hear. The government shrugged and went to work to get a second resolution that would remove any doubt. They encountered the French veto. Goldsmith was flown to Washington and spoken to, no doubt impressed with some red carpet treatment and the awesome enormity of the issue, and at the same time the government got an ultimatum from the army saying they needed legal cover before they would fight. So Goldsmith settled a second, much shorter opinion, which said the war would be fine (note: nothing material had changed since the earlier opinion) and this was shown to parliament (which did not know about the earlier advice).

60 barristers (not the most revolutionary body in the kingdom) complained to the Bar Council about Goldsmith's unprofessional conduct but the Bar Council (not the most courageous or principled body n the kingdom) decided that it was prohibited on constitutional grounds from looking into the matter.

Beat that!
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Not only that, but the government claimed its actions were legal on the grounds that Goldsmith had "ruled" them to be legal, but continued to refuse to publish Goldsmith's reasoning on the grounds that legal advice between counsel (Goldsmith) and client (the UK government) should remain confidential.

Imagine a gangster up in court claiming that his actions were legal, and telling the judge, "but my lawyer told me it was OK."
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
The problem with the timer fragment - an amalgam of production and custom work, with some characteristics that make no sense for either - is that it defies a coherent explanation, not just of who might have used or planted it, but what it even is. A truthful investigator must admit to being stumped. That, unfortunately, can be construed as a vague conspiracy theory in which "something else happened," but no one knows what.
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I'm stumped and I admit it. You can speculate all day about the thing and still come to no rational conclusion. I've basically parked it pending more information showing up.

I get a bit impatient sometimes when people keep on and on about it, and in particular when people seem to imply that if it can be proved not to have been a plant, then Megrahi has been proved to be guilty. I don't know whether it fell out of the sky or not, either answer would be extraordinarily interesting, but I do know that entirety separate suitcase evidence proves Megrahi's innocence.

I've taken to treating this as a problem with sequential levels. Deal with level one first, before moving on. It turns out that the suitcase jigsaw is level one. The timer fragment is not.
 
Rolfe said:
I'm stumped and I admit it. You can speculate all day about the thing and still come to no rational conclusion. I've basically parked it pending more information showing up.

I get a bit impatient sometimes when people keep on and on about it, and in particular when people seem to imply that if it can be proved not to have been a plant, then Megrahi has been proved to be guilty. I don't know whether it fell out of the sky or not, either answer would be extraordinarily interesting, but I do know that entirety separate suitcase evidence proves Megrahi's innocence.

I've taken to treating this as a problem with sequential levels. Deal with level one first, before moving on. It turns out that the suitcase jigsaw is level one. The timer fragment is not.
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It seems to suggest the possibility of a secondary timer, so the bomb could be flown without exploding. In other words, it could be set such that a barometric fuse could only charge the capacitor after the timer had run down. But even if the bomb was designed that way, it doesn't mean it was used that way. And I don't know enough about electronics to know if this is realistic or even possible. It is just a thought that occurred to me.

I fully accept the evidence as proving that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, and further that Malta is the least likely airport for a terrorist to choose for introducing a bomb. It would be like a burglar coming down a chimney even though he knew the front door was unlocked.
 
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