I had to listen to it again because I was too busy ROTFL to take it all in the first time.
Frank Duggan is an odd cove. He was a political placeman parachuted into the Families of PA103 by the US government, and he seems to have found himself a cosy little sinecure. These people are all now extremely rich, thanks to the very large compensation payments they received from both Pan Am and Gadaffi. They can well afford a paid spokesman to keep the media off their backs.
I'm genuinely shocked though, at how ignorant he is about his subject. There's a huge amount of information available, from official reports and judgements to jpgs of crucial items of evidence. It's not that hard to become informed. Nobody's paying me to do it, but I could wipe the floor with him on the subject after less than a year, compared to his boasted 20 years involvement. I could actually make a far better case for Megrahi's guilt than he can. It wouldn't be a strong case, compared to the evidence suggesting he
didn't do it, but there are a couple of pieces of evidence you could build a rational discussion out of. I've never heard him mention either of them. He just tells us how angry this all makes him, and shouts over anyone expressing a contrary opinion.
Just about every single thing he says in that interview is simply WRONG. He says there's no doubt in the mind of anyone who has looked at the evidence that Megrahi is guilty. This is utter nonsense. It's actually extremely difficult to find anyone in that category - in the end you come down to David Shayler of all people, and a couple of guys who were involved in the original investigation who won't consider they might have got it wrong. In contrast, the internet and the quality press are pretty much lousy with people who don't see how anyone could have been convicted on the evidence presented.
George counters (with some justification) that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Board thought there was a possible miscarriage of justice. Duggan dismisses this by maintaining that the evidence presented to the SCCRB was the work of Robert Black and Jim Swire, not Megrahi's lawyers (which is nonsense), and says it was all dismissed. Which it wasn't. He then admits 3 or 4 points were to go before the court again (actually it was six). He's correct that all the points we know about (four of them) concerned the evidence of Tony Gauci. (There were two more points, but these were never made public.)
His misunderstanding of Gauci's evidence is laughable. He declares Gauci was interviewed 19 times and gave 19 statements because 19 jurisdictions were involved in the incident - 19 different countries. "So it's not surprising there were a few inconsistencies." This is nonsense. Gauci actually gave about 25 statements, though only 21 were produced in court, the others having unaccountably gone astray. They were all given to the Scottish and/or the Maltese detectives, as he was interviewed and re-interviewed, and said he remembered something else, or changed his story. Where Frank got the idea that he did 19 identical
de novo interviews with 19 different jurisdictions I can't imagine - his own fevered imagination, it seems.
When George asked him why he dismissed the doubts about this testimony, he simply declared that the judges found it credible. George then asked what he thought about the $2 million bribe Gauci had been paid by the US government for this testimony. Bluster. Who says he was paid that? As George said, it's a matter of public record. Frank missed a trick, because although it appears to be true, I think it's a massive leak (underpinned by the humble shopkeeper's current luxury lifestyle in Australia) rather than something with full documentation. But Frank could only bluster, and then, as he always does, get incoherent with anger.
Frank then missed another trick. George asked him his opinion about the discrepancies between Gauci's description of his customer and Megrahi himself, but he made a mistake. He declared that Gauci said the purchaser was "in his sixties". This is wrong. Gauci said he was about 50, or perhaps over 50. (Megrahi was 36.) Frank didn't pull him up on it, instead admitted he's "not that familiar" with Gauci's evidence. George quite reasonably suggests that perhaps he should be. Frank falls back on "the judges thought he was credible!"
George points out that Gauci's evidence was in fact the decisive piece of evidence against Megrahi, and that if that falls, the conviction falls. Frank gets back in bluster mode, declaring that no, there's "a huge amount of evidence". This isn't the case of course. If you take out Gauci's evidence, which should never have stood in the first place, there is only one very circumstantial and very questionable piece of evidence against Megrahi left. Frank just doesn't get it.
He crowns his tirade by declaring that Megrahi lied on oath - in particular that he lied about being in Gauci's store, which is a bit circular if Gauci's identification evidence is what is in question. But he lied and lied and lied repeatedly! In court, under oath! Er, Megrahi never took the witness stand in court. He never opened his mouth. (This may have been a bad mistake.) Anyone with even a trivial acquaintance with the case knows this. (Megrahi seems to have lied to a journalist making a documentary at one stage. Er, so?)
This is about the point where Duggan hangs up on Galloway, after calling the Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and the spokesman for the UK families of Flight 103 (the father of one of the victims) "cranks".
Why does this matter in this thread? It matters because Frank Duggan is the voice US residents hear in their media, pontificating about this case. It is Frank those posters are echoing and parroting, when they declare that Megrahi is unquestionably guilty and start castigating the Scottish criminal justice system. A man who has no personal connection with the incident, who knows less about it than someone who has spent a few weeks reading around the subject on the internet, and who is being paid handsomely to defend the
status quo by people who owe their current wealth to the Official Story, and have a vested interest in not having that challenged.
Think about that, posters.
Rolfe.
