The real harsh truth to the public perception of The Lockerbie Bombing is that it's solved. A Libyan did it.
Everyone I've spoken to recently in the place that I live (Channel Islands) is convinced. Can they name him? Nope. Can they say how it was done? Nope. Are they at all interested? Certainly not.
It's not quite like that in Scotland. Not that the media aren't doing their damndest to make it like that.
All 270 murders 20yrs ago, and more, actually do count for nothing. It's hard to believe isn't it?
I don't think it's as much "count for nothing", as the feeling that international politics are more important than individual justice. Also, I think a lot of the people involved in the investigation genuinely believe they got the right man. When law enforcement grabs the wrong end of the stick and hangs on to it, as happened in this case, their capacity for tunnel vision and self-delusion is infinite.
I joined this forum many months ago thinking I'd find someone with an argument to point towards something concrete to pin on Mr Megrahi (hell, I'd have settled for something vague) but to find nothing was really very surprising. I've also clearly missed the point in the trial transcripts that convinces those that are so sure. I am also unable to interpret the opinion of the court into a guilty verdict, a thing of itself which beggars belief.
I agree. I started the first thread about Lockerbie with a feeling that the claims of wrongful conviction might turn out to be conspiracy theorising on a par with the 9/11 nonsense. However, even granted that they're not, I was at least expecting a case that could be weighed on its merits. A case where legitimate views might be held on both sides, even if one felt that one side had more merit than the other.
But nothing.
There's no evidence against Megrahi at all. The coerced and bribed Gauci identification doesn't stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny, and once that's gone, there's nothing.
What I have found interesting is teasing out how it happened that the investigation managed to go so spectacularly off the rails. So much has been written about a deliberate change of tack to coincide with the first Gulf War, but I don't think it was that at all. I think if that was a consideration, it was purely coincidental. I think the investigation was doomed, in hindsight, on 30th December 1988 when John Orr announced that the bomb had almost certainly not gone on at Heathrow.
If they had been prepared to revise that when further evidence emerged, things might have been so very different. But they weren't, and an examination of what went on during the spring of 1989 reveals a pretty determined CYA effort mounted to provide support for the contention - including a bunch of tests run at Indian Head based on an assumption which was held to for as long as it was needed (to get through the FAI), but was then abandoned for the Zeist trial, and nobody seemed to notice that this completely destroyed the underlying prosecution position. (I'm talking about the assumption that the luggage loaded in the interline shed at Heathrow could not possibly have been moved subsequently, even by a few inches.)
The final confirmation of the derail seems to have been the Erac printout, and in my view that is the central coincidence of the entire affair.
Something caused a baggage handler to code tray 8849 for PA103A, and we don't know what it was. It's about as certain as it can be that it was
not a bronze Samsonite suitcase with a ticking bomb in it, but that's about as far as we can go. If that item hadn't appeared to be associated with a flight from Malta, when the clothes that had been identified as blast-damaged were manufactured on Malta, that tray would have been about as interesting as tray 6720, which was equally mysterious. But the Malta coincidence was too much for the sleuth mentality, and after that the juggernaut was unstoppable. Malta it was, and the more we don't find any evidence to back that up, the more we're convinced!
It's not that I'm dismissing the infamous timer fragment. The timer fragment is
fascinating. But it's relatively peripheral. It seems to have started off simply as an important part of the CYA exercise, a means to explain how it was possible for the device to have arrived on the feeder flight without exploding, by providing evidence of something that wasn't a barometric timer. It became more than that of course, because of the second major coincidence, that the man who happened to be at the airport in Malta at the right moment happened to know the manufacturer of the timers, but I don't believe that was part of any Cunning Plan.
I think the investigators simply see their long-held conviction that the bomb came from Malta (held way before they knew about Megrahi's presence there that morning), look at Megrahi being there at the crucial time, looking suspicious and with a connection to the manufacturer of the timer, and as far as they are concerned that's that. He's
obviously guilty. The fact that there isn't a shred of evidence to support that isn't something they're prepared even to contemplate, not after three years hard graft getting to where they got.
There are no secrets to be found in Libya. I reckon this is because no-one's looking. Why is no-one looking? I refer you to the first sentence of this paragraph.
I don't know that nobody's looking. I'll just settle for nobody fabricating anything.
The secrets belong to the trial judges themselves.
I'm genuinely grateful for my short encounter with Ming the Merciless, because it gave me a little insight into the mind of the trial judges (or at least the two who were in favour of convicting). The superiority that says, we have such keen intellect and nigh-supernatural insight that we can magically see a truth that mere mortals don't recognise.
These two guys were apparently hard-wired to believe every defendant who came up before the court was guilty. I think there was also a deep-seated feeling that surely the 1991 indictments and the eight years of punitive sanctions against Libya and all the posturing about "incontrovertible evidence" surely couldn't have been
that wrong.
I think they bought into the prosecution case wholesale, and simply swallowed it hook, line, sinker and rowboat. And I don't think that would be so unusual if it weren't for jury trials. (Of course juries do that too sometimes, unfortunately.)
I am genuinely sorry for those that have lost. When Mr Megrahi dies, this controversy won't. It will become a curiosity of history unless a Scottish government, judiciary and police force is willing to open itself up to public ridicule. Two words for that possibilty: Shirley McKie.
I don't think it's going to lie down as easily as that. Shirley's dad is on the JFM committee, for a start.
I just wish we knew what it was that was in tray 8849 and why it was coded for PA103A. I can't help feeling that if we knew that, the whole thing would open up like a rose in the sunshine.
Rolfe.
