Pan Am 103: Unaccompanied bag from Malta: Evidence?

[Rolfe]

Banned? He was sus....

Oh.

Thank God, mod or whoever. I was slightly dreading the end of the suspension.

Actually, he seemed pro-conspiracy here. He was the one saying the Zeist trial was a deliberate set-up to have Megrahi convicted, and that it would not be reversed no matter what the evidence because it was political.

To be honest, I don't think he knew anything much about the case. He just thought of something contrarian to say and then said it, with as much passive-aggression as he could manage. He latched on to my musings on whether or not there was actually a grand conspiracy and started making mock. He nominated me for the Stundies a couple of times, apparently seeing contradictions in my posts nobody else could see.

Then when we managed to crack the suitcase jigsaw, in the thread about the Heathrow evidence, every other post was him mocking the discussion. I honestly don't think he could manipulate the suitcases - the pieces of the jigsaw - in his head, and so couldn't follow the argument. I just wish post-banning they could delete all these posts because he makes a mockery of a very important discovery, but ah well.

Oddly, he sent me what seemed to be a sincere PM warning me against new poster LittleSwan, who is a genuine expert who has helped enormously. LittleSwan wanted some primary evidence and I got it for him. JB was all, should you be giving him this stuff? I had (quite obviously) been in email contact with LittleSwan by that time, and sent JB off with a flea in his ear telling him to keep his face out of what he didn't understand. I don't suppose that helped.

Yes it would be good to discuss the actual case. The problem was that every time anyone bumped one of the threads to continue the discussion, JB was immediately in there trolling.

Rolfe.

ETA: I realise now that JB did exactly the same as Scissorhands, who was also suspended at a time when he was trolling this thread (all his posts in the thread ended up in AAH). They were running it as a sort of double act just before Christmas. Both were banned for sending abusive PMs while suspended.

I thought they were only trolling to amuse themselves. But the one thing you don't do if you're in control of yourself around here is send abusive PMs to mods or admins. This suggests they really were riled up about all this. I can only think, there's nowt so queer as folks.

 

[Chaos]

A rather morbid part of me wonders how long it will take for the next troll to show up in Lockerbie-related threads... and how long that one will be allowed to act unhindered until he is able to do something not even our admins/mods want to happen.

 

[Tomtomkent]

Banned? He was sus....

Oh.

Thank God, mod or whoever. I was slightly dreading the end of the suspension.

Actually, he seemed pro-conspiracy here. He was the one saying the Zeist trial was a deliberate set-up to have Megrahi convicted, and that it would not be reversed no matter what the evidence because it was political.

To be honest, I don't think he knew anything much about the case. He just thought of something contrarian to say and then said it, with as much passive-aggression as he could manage. He latched on to my musings on whether or not there was actually a grand conspiracy and started making mock. He nominated me for the Stundies a couple of times, apparently seeing contradictions in my posts nobody else could see.

Then when we managed to crack the suitcase jigsaw, in the thread about the Heathrow evidence, every other post was him mocking the discussion. I honestly don't think he could manipulate the suitcases - the pieces of the jigsaw - in his head, and so couldn't follow the argument. I just wish post-banning they could delete all these posts because he makes a mockery of a very important discovery, but ah well.

Oddly, he sent me what seemed to be a sincere PM warning me against new poster LittleSwan, who is a genuine expert who has helped enormously. LittleSwan wanted some primary evidence and I got it for him. JB was all, should you be giving him this stuff? I had (quite obviously) been in email contact with LittleSwan by that time, and sent JB off with a flea in his ear telling him to keep his face out of what he didn't understand. I don't suppose that helped.

Yes it would be good to discuss the actual case. The problem was that every time anyone bumped one of the threads to continue the discussion, JB was immediately in there trolling.

Rolfe.

Sad to say, there are those who believe there was a conspiracy, or that the results of previous trials and investigations were sound, or any number of contrarian views who would feel no need to use the tone or nature of those particular posts.

Personally I can honestly say that about everything I know of the case was from the private eye special nearly twenty years ago and my level of understanding is so low I can not align to any side of the arguments with out reading these sort of threads from page one and making my head explode with data-dumps.

I would have rather liked some of the more knowledgeable posters to have their conversations so I could at the very least get a gist of the differing views out there before I tried to decide which was more convincing.
Trolling utterly stopped any chance of that.

 

[tsig]

Banned? He was sus....

Oh.

Thank God, mod or whoever. I was slightly dreading the end of the suspension.

Actually, he seemed pro-conspiracy here. He was the one saying the Zeist trial was a deliberate set-up to have Megrahi convicted, and that it would not be reversed no matter what the evidence because it was political.

To be honest, I don't think he knew anything much about the case. He just thought of something contrarian to say and then said it, with as much passive-aggression as he could manage. He latched on to my musings on whether or not there was actually a grand conspiracy and started making mock. He nominated me for the Stundies a couple of times, apparently seeing contradictions in my posts nobody else could see.

Then when we managed to crack the suitcase jigsaw, in the thread about the Heathrow evidence, every other post was him mocking the discussion. I honestly don't think he could manipulate the suitcases - the pieces of the jigsaw - in his head, and so couldn't follow the argument. I just wish post-banning they could delete all these posts because he makes a mockery of a very important discovery, but ah well.

Oddly, he sent me what seemed to be a sincere PM warning me against new poster LittleSwan, who is a genuine expert who has helped enormously. LittleSwan wanted some primary evidence and I got it for him. JB was all, should you be giving him this stuff? I had (quite obviously) been in email contact with LittleSwan by that time, and sent JB off with a flea in his ear telling him to keep his face out of what he didn't understand. I don't suppose that helped.

Yes it would be good to discuss the actual case. The problem was that every time anyone bumped one of the threads to continue the discussion, JB was immediately in there trolling.

Rolfe.

JB now has one thing in common with Menard, they were both banned from JREF.

 

[BangBang]

JB spent too much time in Menard's company. He ended up accusing people who didn't 100% agree with him of being Menard just like old Rob used to accuse others of being JB.

 

[Rolfe]

Sad to say, there are those who believe there was a conspiracy, or that the results of previous trials and investigations were sound, or any number of contrarian views who would feel no need to use the tone or nature of those particular posts.

I don't think there has ever been a poster supporting Megrahi's guilt who has used a neutral tone. It's all been sneers and name-calling. There has also been nobody who has been prepared to debate on the basis of the evidence. It has all been assertions that the judges convicted so that's all that's needed, or dredging up irrelevancies to blacken Megrahi's character, or (in one case) asserting that the authorities must have had conclusive evidence of guilt they couldn't present in court because it would have been a security risk.

Personally I can honestly say that about everything I know of the case was from the private eye special nearly twenty years ago and my level of understanding is so low I can not align to any side of the arguments with out reading these sort of threads from page one and making my head explode with data-dumps.

The Private Eye special was 2001, so actually only 13 years ago. It's very good indeed and it was where I started from after a JREF poster recommended it to me as a good start. It was from Paul Foot's highlighting of Bedford's evidence (and in particular the date of his statement) that my great interest in the Heathrow baggage transfers began.

I think it is a great pity Foot died in 2004. I think he had an enormous grasp of the evidence and could have contributed a great deal. Ian Hislop and his reporter Heather Mills are supportive, but they don't have his dedication to the case.

I would have rather liked some of the more knowledgeable posters to have their conversations so I could at the very least get a gist of the differing views out there before I tried to decide which was more convincing.
Trolling utterly stopped any chance of that.

I think one of the problems is that the conversations have now got to a point where the knowledgeable people are talking about things that are difficult for new posters to follow. There is nobody putting forward a contrary view, and we're now on the detail of how the investigation managed to get it so terribly wrong. And the threads showing how we got here are long and tortuous and terribly difficult to read.

I don't want to be accused of just pushing my book, but that's partly why I wrote it. An account of the investigation and where it went wrong that encapsulates the important stuff we figured out in these threads.

In a nutshell, the bomb went on at Heathrow, not Malta, and the original investigation missed clear and obvious clues that should have pointed them in the right direction, right from the start.

Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes in the bomb suitcase, but the cops were by that time so desperate because of their failure to find out how the bomb had been smuggled on board a plane at Malta (easy answer, because nobody actually did that), they fell on him like starving hyenas and effectively fitted him up.

The fragment of fibreglass known as PT/35b wasn't what the investigators thought it was, that is a part of a timing device sold to the Libyan military in 1985. And the forensic evidence to prove that was in their possession, but they ignored it, and didn't present it in court. (That was only revealed in early 2012, so most of the thread that discusses that piece of evidence was operating on a false premise.)

But hey, there's no better place to start than Paul Foot. He's not right about everything, but he's right about most things.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52409411/...-Justice-Paul-Foot-Private-Eye-Special-Report

Or you could give a more recent publication a shot.

http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=2499

Rolfe.

 

[BangBang]

Paul Foot was a hero of mine. A great journalist with a genuine concern for his fellow man.

 

[Rolfe]

Also very, very bright.

Rolfe.