Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
The Americans have their man for the Lockerbie bombing and are close now to a trial which in any democracy wouldn’t be allowed to happen due to the legal irregularities and malfeasance. But before we ask ourselves whether even the U.S. is a real democracy – or one that has all the auspices of one without the heart – we should never forget the farce of the original trial which found two Libyan spooks guilty of making and planting the bomb on Pan Am 103, with barely a grain of solid evidence to even link them to the crime. A travesty of justice on an epic scale was the theme established in the Netherlands at Camp Zeist, and we can hardly blame the Americans for continuing the theme with remarkable fortitude, impervious to any ignominy which exposes their first efforts as perfidious evidence-tampering and witness intimidation on a grand scale.
The madness continues at an even greater pace, though.
Soon, a Libyan suspect called Abu Agila Mohammad Masud will stand trial, accused by the Americans of being the bomb-maker. Yet the details around his arrest and interview (read: ‘torture’) are louche at best, and most insiders believe he is a patsy. In recent months, U.S. investigators have unearthed impressive amounts of documents, data, testimonies and even the accused Masud himself – building their case that ‘The Libyans did it’ – but none of it really stands up to assiduous scrutiny, legal or otherwise. Even a U.S. judge recently commented that the prosecutor’s case risked going to appeal in the event of Masud being found guilty, as most of the evidence hadn’t been ‘legalised’ by a number of countries’ authorities around the world. “Proceed at your peril,” the judge recently warned the prosecutor. One has to wonder: if U.S. prosecutors cannot even perform such a remedial task as getting stamps from the various judicial authorities, then how convincing can their case be in the first place – and who is behind the initiative?
The Lockerbie case breaks all the records for precedents. Within the borders of the UK, it is the greatest terror act there has been – but also the greatest cover-up by the British and Scottish governments, particularly the latter. We should not judge the investigations, though, by what they have uncovered – or covered up – but more by their omission to look at key facts, interview star witnesses, and not be distracted by political agendas. The two camps, which offer only the binary options of, on the one side Gaddafi, and on the other a Palestinian group who were experts in bringing down planes, is juvenile and not at all serious. There are nuances there which need to be unpacked, and if investigators are unable or unwilling to examine them, then we can only conclude that a massive miscarriage of justice is still being carried out today.
It is perhaps also an oversimplification to imagine that state actors could have played a role in the bombing of Pan Am 103 while operating on their own initiative. The camp which concludes the PFLP-GC were culpable – led by Dr Jim Swire – perhaps don’t go far enough in their own investigation before drawing conclusions that this group carried it out. Even the Saudi press just in recent days pointed the finger at its chief bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat as being the likeliest candidate, but still miss the point entirely. Regardless of whether you are in the Gaddafi camp or the PFLP one, everyone seems to be missing the bigger story and failing to look for bigger pieces of the jigsaw. The thought process seems to be that if we can nail the bomber, then we will work out who commissioned him. And so in the meantime, any investigation into who was the architect of Lockerbie will always be overlooked. This perverse dichotomy of logic is what has made the case unsolvable for nearly 40 years – which suits a number of Western governments who knew about Pan Am 103 beforehand and remained silent.
And yet there is evidence out there in the domain of intelligence circles which confirm that Khreesat was indeed the bomb-maker, but he was not working for the PFLP – he had gone freelance. While it is hard to imagine that the CIA allowed the bomb on board so as to kill three rogue officers who were on the flight, hell-bent on blowing the whistle when they got back to the U.S. about the program which effectively helped Shia groups in Lebanon become drug-runners – it is likely to be true. But what is much harder to imagine is that it was CIA officers themselves who had been planning to bring down a U.S. plane in Scotland for at least two years, with the express purpose of cranking up the pressure on President Reagan to bomb Libya and overthrow Gaddafi. Framing the Libyan leader so as to muster an enormous outcry in the U.S. was the plot, when two CIA officers met Safia Gaddafi’s wife – the financier of the plot – in a south London mosque in June 1987 to hammer out a strategy. For obvious legal reasons, I cannot publish their names, but it has been confirmed to me by a British agent who was there on other business that Khreesat was the bomb-maker. Gaddafi’s ex-wife wanted badly to seek revenge for her divorce and losing a child, according to the MI6 agent, who listened to the whole meeting and was shocked by what they were hearing.
Yet none of this is being examined or verified. The MI6 officer in question has presented themselves to the U.S. prosecutor and was only too aware that in 1988 one of the many weekly ‘controlled flights’ from Lebanon en route to the U.S. had drugs on board, but were an easy way of not simply getting a bomb on board, but were ripe for being used to deflect blame towards Gaddafi – and so the two accused at Camp Zeist were used by Gaddafi’s wife as stooges for the bombing. Among a coterie of DIA, CIA and MI6 officers in Lebanon at that time, all knew of the CIA plot and all knew it was only a matter of time before a Pan Am flight came down over Scotland. It was simply a question of timing before all of the elements lined up – and the three renegade officers on board completed the last piece of the puzzle.
The Libyans had to fake the evidence, though, which was essential for Safia Gaddafi to agree to finance the whole thing – and by Christmas 1988 everything was in place.
It was critical that the two Libyans accused – one being somewhat of an expert with explosives – were framed, and so they were set to task to set up the Malta link which was crucial for the FBI and CIA – and now for the prosecutor in the Masud case. Perhaps they knew they were being set up, and in the case of Meghrahi, sent someone else to go to “Mary’s shop” to buy the clothes. There are still many questions left wide open, but a rogue CIA operation which involved killing U.S. citizens would certainly explain the extraordinary lengths the Americans are going to presently to cover up what really happened to Pan Am 103. But who was the poor soul tricked into carrying the bomb onto the plane in his luggage? Not the young Lebanese man Khaled Nazir Jafaar, who was already working for the DEA drug-running program and thought that his cassette recorder – or at least his suitcase – was packed full of heroin, making him nervous when he stood in line to check in at Frankfurt’s Pan Am desk. The real ‘bomber’ whom the CIA used was a white, powerful key figure of international politics who was happy to take his own life. Lockerbie is a movie which can’t be made, as Hollywood producers would argue that no one would believe the real story – and Americans certainly aren’t ready to find out the truth, a point that Erik Kenerson, the U.S. prosecutor of the Masud case, is probably banking on.
