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| Is Megrahi guilty? |
| Probably |
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33% |
[ 7 ] |
| Probably not |
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52% |
[ 11 ] |
| No opinion |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| Guilty or not, there's more to this than meets the eye |
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14% |
[ 3 ] |
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| Total Votes : 21 |
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| Author |
Message |
Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2009 8:05 pm Post subject: The 'Lockerbie Bomber' - Guilty or Innocent? |
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Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is going home to die.
It's interesting that of the victims' relatives, most British relatives believe that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is probably innocent, while most American relatives are convinced of his guilt.
If he is indeed innocent, what a terrible fate, to have lived so many years in a Scottish jail, far from his home and young children. If he is indeed guilty, I still can't help feeling sorry for his young children, especially as he probably took the fall for bigger fish.
Anger from US as freed Lockerbie bomber flies home to Libya
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The Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was released from prison by the Scottish government today and flown out of the UK � to the fury of the Obama administration in the US.
Barack Obama, speaking on a talkshow, said the decision was a "mistake".
Megrahi left Greenock prison with a police escort and was taken to Glasgow international airport, where an Afriqiyah Airways jet took off for Tripoli just before 3.30pm.
The Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, made the decision to release Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, on compassionate grounds.
The White House and the US state department criticised the decision, which they had vigorously opposed.
"The United States deeply regrets the decision," said the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. "As we have expressed repeatedly to officials of the government of the United Kingdom and to Scottish authorities, we continue to believe that Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland."
In Britain, the Tory leader, David Cameron, described Megrahi's release as "wrong and the product of some completely nonsensical thinking".
After the plane took off, a statement by Megrahi was released in which he maintained his innocence. "I am obviously very relieved to be leaving my prison cell at last and returning to Libya, my homeland," the statement said.
"To those victims' relatives who can bear to hear me say this: they continue to have my sincere sympathy for the unimaginable loss that they have suffered.
"And I say in the clearest possible terms, which I hope every person in every land will hear: all of this I have had to endure for something that I did not do."
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Relatives on both sides of the Atlantic were told by officials that the announcement was timed to avoid US relatives waking up to discover Megrahi had been freed.
A number of them reacted angrily to the announcement. Kara Weipz, of Mt Laurel, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old brother Richard Monetti was killed, said: "I don't understand how the Scots can show compassion. It is an utter insult and utterly disgusting."
In contrast, many of the British victims' families supported Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds, some of them unconvinced that he was even partly responsible for Lockerbie.
The Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga, 19, died in the attack, said it was "right he should go home to die in dignity with his family".
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 1:57 am Post subject: |
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It seems from some of the posts on this forum, that the controversy about Megrahi's guilt/innocence has not been brought to their attention.
Even the rightwing media is questioning his original conviction:
Jailed for life - but is this man really guilty of killing 270?
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The seemingly imminent release of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi has highlighted growing doubts over whether the ex-Libyan intelligence officer was guilty. For the 57-year-old was convicted of the murder of 270 people by Scottish judges sitting at a court in the Netherlands on circumstantial evidence.
A second appeal is pending - which can still go ahead if he is returned to Libya on compassionate grounds.
Even a number of the families of the British victims believe that Megrahi, who has always maintained his innocence, is not responsible and his conviction should be quashed.
Dr Hans Kochler, a UN observer at the original trial, suggests that a 'spectacular miscarriage of justice' took place and has questioned the role of intelligence services during the trial.
Megrahi, who had used a false passport and name to enter Malta, was convicted after the prosecution argued he had placed the bomb, hidden in a suitcase, on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, Germany.
The bomb was then transferred on to the Pan Am plane that went to Heathrow en route to New York, prosecutors said.
Crucially, lawyers say, there is now evidence that two key witnesses were either paid or offered millions of dollars and that the credibility of forensic experts is open to question.
They will focus on the evidence of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, a key prosecution witness, who claimed he had sold clothes to Megrahi which were later found scattered over the crash site and had been in the suitcase containing the device.
However, it has emerged that Gauci had seen a picture of the Libyan in a magazine linking him to the bombing, a fact which could have distorted his judgment. The headline on the article asked: 'Who planted the bomb?'
Megrahi's lawyers claim Gauci was interviewed 17 times and gave a string of inconsistent statements, putting the vital identification in grave doubt.
Lawyers at an appeal will dispute whether Megrahi ever bought the clothes.
The CIA is said to have offered Gauci and his brother Paul more than �1million and a place in a witness protection programme - an offer not disclosed at trial.
The Libyan's legal team will also focus on a circuit board fragment which was identified as part of an electronic timer similar to that found on a Libyan intelligence agent who had been arrested ten months previously, carrying materials for a Semtex bomb.
The timer was allegedly traced through its manufacturer to the Libyan military and an employee identified the fragment at Megrahi's trial.
The company's owner later claimed he had declined an offer from the FBI of several million dollars to say that the timer fragment was part of a timer specifically supplied to Libya.
Two years ago the employee who gave evidence at the trial gave a sworn affidavit in which he admitted he had lied. He said he had stolen a timing device of the type referred to at the trial in June 1989 and given it to an 'official person investigating the Lockerbie case'. |
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After conducting an exhaustive three-year review of the case, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission reported in June 2007 there may have been a miscarriage of justice in Megrahi's case.
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 2:11 am Post subject: |
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Infoseeker
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Lurking somewhere near Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Aug 24, 2009 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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This conviction has been called into question right from the start. This article was written more than 8 years ago:
Flight from the truth
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| The Lockerbie trial was meant to end the saga of Pan Am flight 103. But it didn't take into account the wads of US dollars, or the heroin, or the Hizbullah T-shirt found in the wreckage. As the man convicted of the bombing prepares to appeal, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson argue that there has been a top-level cover-up. |
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During the eight-month trial the prosecution could offer no direct evidence of the bomb being loaded in Malta, and their star witnesses, Abdul Majid Giaka - a former colleague of the two accused - was exposed as a money-motivated fantasist. The court heard that Mebo sold identical timers to the East German Stasi (which armed Middle East terrorist groups), and the evidence of the Mary's House shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, suggested that the man who bought the clothes was considerably older and taller than Megrahi, and that the purchase occurred two weeks earlier, when, it is believed, Megrahi had an alibi. The fact that the judges refused to be swayed by the clouds of doubt hanging over the prosecution case left many observers staggered.
In the alternative version, the real culprits lay not in Libya, but in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. It begins in July 1988, when a US warship accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people. The CIA later revealed that, within days, Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) to avenge the incident. The group had close ties to the Lebanese Islamic radicals Hizbullah and in the early 1970s specialised in bombing airliners. Its favoured method was to plant carefully disguised bombs on innocent dupes.
The group's leader, Ahmed Jibril, dispatched his right-hand man, Hafez Dalkamoni, and a bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, to West Germany, where Khreesat manufactured at least five barometric bombs designed to blow up aircraft, two - possibly more - of which were built into Toshiba radio-cassette players. Six weeks before Lockerbie, police raided the PFLP-GC gang and found one of the Toshiba bombs. In the official version this put an end to the revenge mission, but there is every reason to doubt this. The PFLP-GC may not have relied solely on Khreesat to make bombs and, in any case, at least four of his devices were unaccounted for. Three were recovered four months after Lockerbie, but the second Toshiba was never found.
Five weeks after the raid, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned of the continuing threat of an Iranian reprisal and noted that Middle Eastern terrorist groups active in Germany had the infrastructure to conduct bombings. At around the same time, the US state department circulated a specific warning that radical Palestinians were planning to attack a Pan Am target in Europe.
Three months after the bombing, the transport minister Paul Channon told lobby journalists that the culprits had been identified and charges were imminent. Everyone knew he meant the PFLP-GC. The months passed and nothing happened. A White House leak later revealed that Margaret Thatcher and George Bush had agreed to downplay the investigation for fear of endangering hostages in Lebanon - almost all held by Syrian and Iranian proxy groups. Following the Gulf war, in which Syria became a crucial western ally, the PFLP-GC and their Syrian and Iranian sponsors were officially exonerated, and the blame was shifted to Libya.
The alternative version becomes murkier still when it comes to how Jibril's men got the bomb on to flight 103. Two PFLP-GC insiders and many western intelligence sources claim it was planted in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese-American mule in a heroin trafficking operation. The whistle-blowing spooks say elements within the CIA were allowing Middle Eastern dealers to ship drugs to America in return for help in locating and releasing US hostages. In allowing the suitcases containing heroin to bypass security procedures, the CIA handed the dealers' terrorist associates a failsafe means of getting the bomb on the plane.
Among the Lockerbie victims was a party of US intelligence specialists, led by Major Charles McKee of the DIA, returning from an aborted hostage-rescue mission in Lebanon. A variety of sources have claimed that McKee, who was fiercely anti-drugs, got wind of the CIA's deals and was returning to Washington to blow the whistle. A few months after Lockerbie, reports emerged from Lebanon that McKee's travel plans had been leaked to the bombers. The implication was that Flight 103 was targeted, in part, because he was on board.
As with the official version, there is no proof of this scenario, but there is a chain of circumstantial evidence. Much of it comes from the army of police officers and volunteers who scoured the vast crash site in the weeks after the bombing. And much of it was either not revealed at the recent trial or, worse, covered up.
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| Who engineered the cover-up? Almost certainly not anyone in Britain. Police officers and volunteer searchers have spoken of American agents removing items from the crash site. A proper inquiry into these issues could reveal a picture that governments on both sides of the Atlantic dare not face, but without it the echoes of the Lockerbie bomb will be ringing for a long time to come. |
If you'd like to read the whole article, here's the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/jun/27/lockerbie.features11
Also from 8 years ago:
Lockerbie was an impossible verdict
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On January 31, after an eight-month trial, three Scottish judges, sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, found a Libyan intelligence officer, Ali Al-Megrahi, guilty of the Lockerbie bombing - Britain's biggest mass murder - acquitting his colleague, Khalifa Fhimah.
Two days earlier, senior Foreign Office officials briefed a group of journalists in London. They painted a picture of a bright new chapter in Britain's relations with Colonel Gadafy's regime. They made it quite clear they assumed both the Libyans in the dock would be acquitted.
The FO officials were not alone. Most independent observers believed it was impossible for the court to find the prosecution had proved its case against Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt.
It was not only the lack of hard evidence - something the judges admitted in their lengthy judgment. The case was entwined, if the judges were right, in a sequence of remarkable coincidences.
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There is a widespread view that the US and Britain changed their tack when they badly needed Syria's support, and Iran's quiescence, for the Gulf war after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They thus fingered the two Libyans, insisting they placed the bomb in an unaccompanied bag at Malta's Luqa airport, where it was transferred to the Pan Am plane at Frankfurt. An earlier Palestinian suspect, Abu Talb, had also visited Malta. He was later held in Sweden on terrorist charges and identified by the British as a prime suspect.
You don't have to look for conspiracies - maybe Jaafar's presence on the plane has an entirely innocent explanation - to question the prosecution's version of events. US authorities issued a series of specific warnings about a bomb threat before Lockerbie. These, and intelligence reports implicating Iran, were dismissed as speculative or hoaxes.
The evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner was extremely shaky. He was uncertain about dates and the weather that day. He told the police the purchaser was "six foot or more" and over 50. Megrahi was five foot eight inches and 37 at the time.
According to Ashton and Ferguson, replica MST-13 timers - implicating Megrahi but only presented as evidence after a long delay - were manufactured by the CIA but that information was not passed to the defence. The evidence of Abdul Giaka, a Libyan who defected to the CIA and star prosecution witness, was described by the judges as "at best exaggerated, at worst simply untrue".
The judgment is littered with assumptions and criticisms of prosecution witnesses. They refer to a "mass of conflicting evidence". Megrahi has lodged an appeal. The Scottish appeal judges surely owe it to the victims' families to explain the string of unanswered questions.
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 9:17 am Post subject: |
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Megrahi is not only not guilty, there is NO evidence linking him to the crime.
Why was Pam Am 103 shot down? And why did Libya take the rap for it? According to MP for Lockerbie Tam Danyell is was a "business deal"; and he's spot on. In a tit-for-tat deal Libya claimed responsibility and had three UN sanctions against it removed.
The air embargo against Libya was crippling the economy and at the time there was a huge shortage of polio vaccinations. Anyone who traded with Libya would have had their assets frozen. Libya has the 6th largest reserve of "good" oil reserves, the king which meant it was very cheap to extract and process but lack of investment was crippling it's economy. After they took the rap and had the sanctions removes huge investment flooded in.
A company called "Interforce", which consists of ex-intelligence officers from the CIA, Mossad etc. released a report of their findings, and it'll blow you away:
It concluded that Eight CIA officers were on board that day who were involved in directing drug traffic involving one "Ghazer" (wrong spelling) who was a DEA officer. the DEA and the CIA had been using Pan Am flights for years to courier hard drugs, heroin, and narcotics which were distributed by the CIA across the US in Detroit, St. Louis, LA and New York.
The plane was blown up because the agents were coming back to the US to blow the cover on that operation, pissed off because they were told it would be escalated.
In Jan 1990 the Toronto Star had an article saying that Eight CIA operatives were on the flight led by Major General Charles Dennis Mckee.
A secret FBI field report revealed there was no suitcase originating in Malta where the accused Libyans allegedly travelled through. Instead it was a CIA front company (think Visor Consultants).
Chairman of Pam Am Thomas Planket was quoted as saying something along the lines of "I thought I was running a airline, not a drug running courier service". This was put forward by Congressman Thomas Trafficante.
Funds from the drug running service came to about $5 billion annually and was integrated with US banking system processed through Morgan Stanley and all the other major banks.
For the complete story with documentation, listen to program 030902 or 090825 at http://takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html.
Has anyone seen The Maltese Double Cross? Looks quite interesting. |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 1:22 pm Post subject: |
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| You left out the correct choice: Guilty as hell. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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| CentralCali wrote: |
| You left out the correct choice: Guilty as hell. |
By all means, do not let the facts muddle up your thinking. |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 8:38 pm Post subject: |
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| That would be your m.o., as with so many other CTs. |
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some waygug-in
Joined: 25 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2009 8:25 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090830141217621
�I�ll reveal true identity of bomber�
Megrahi is to point the finger
August 23,2009
By Ben Borland
Sunday Express
AN AMERICAN citizen is to be named by the Lockerbie bomber as the man who really carried out the terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103.
Megrahi's early release from prison on compassionate grounds.
Lawyers for the bomber were to argue that an "elusive" terrorist codenamed Abu Elias planted the bomb in December 1988, causing the deaths of 270 innocent people.
Megrahi is now expected to identify the man behind this alias.
The Scottish Sunday Express tracked this man down to his home in the US, and he strongly denied having anything to do with the atrocity.
However, we can reveal that he has connections to at least two international terrorists and a Palestinian terror group, as well as links to the US intelligence services.
The man, who works as a schools engineer for the US government, was to become the central figure in Megrahi's aborted appeal. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 6:27 am Post subject: |
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| CentralCali wrote: |
You left out the correct choice: Guilty as hell.
| bacasper wrote: |
| By all means, do not let the facts muddle up your thinking. |
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| CentralCali wrote: |
| That would be your m.o., as with so many other CTs. |
Facts? Absolutely!
Thank you.
| some waygug-in wrote: |
| However, we can reveal that he has connections to at least two international terrorists and a Palestinian terror group, as well as links to the US intelligence services. |
But of course, that is just a conspiracy theory.  |
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chris_J2
Joined: 17 Apr 2006
Location: From Brisbane, Au.
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| Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 7:26 am Post subject: Libyan released |
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Hmmm
Looks like I'm the tie breaker with 1 vote 'guilty or not...'. I'm leaning towards not guilty. There's something fishy about the whole trial process, & I remember following it at the time, & thinking something's not right here. And I'm not a big fan of wonjct's, either. |
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 2:42 am Post subject: |
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Just came across this article from The New Statesman:
Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed
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No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of �strategic interests�.
�The endgame came down to damage limitation,� said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, �because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi�s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.� New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft � he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.
The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, �discovered� in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi�s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was �transferred� through two airports undetected to Flight 103.
A �key secret witness� at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a �protected witness�. The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans� conviction, up to $4m as a reward.
Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in �neutral� Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a �mass of conflicting evidence� and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page �opinion�, wrote Foot, �is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice�. (Lockerbie � the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from the Private Eye website for �5).
Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the �architect� of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr on 11 January 1990, she agreed to �low-key� the disaster after their intelligence services had reported �beyond doubt� that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship�s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr �for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer�.
Peversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran�s support as he built a �coalition� to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. �Like lazy and overfed fish,� wrote Foot, �the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya.� The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centrepiece of Megrahi�s defence.
In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi�s case for appeal. �The commission is of the view,� said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, �that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.�
The words �miscarriage of justice� are missing entirely from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that �higher power�. What a disgrace. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:13 am Post subject: |
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You know Pilger is gonna spin it the worst way against the US.
Who knows if it is true or not. |
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morrisonhotel
Joined: 18 Jul 2009
Location: Gyeonggi-do
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 1:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Infoseeker wrote: |
This conviction has been called into question right from the start. This article was written more than 8 years ago:
Flight from the truth
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Ignore that article. Read the late, great Paul Foot's investigation into the conviction which goes far more in-depth with exploring the conviction. Quite frankly, anyone that can read that and still believe Megrahi is guilty is a moron.
You can find the article here: https://secure2.subscribeonline.co.uk/PEYE/digital_downloads.cfm
Alas, you do need to pay for it if you're not a subscriber. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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France also accused Libya of blowing up thier airplane.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/292565.stm
Maybe Libya is in fact more guilty than this thread is making them out to be here. |
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