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| Ewan Kennedy |
LIBYA AND LOCKERBIE
by EWAN KENNEDY (19 Sept 2023)
The unfolding disaster in Libya serves as a reminder of what western powers, principally the USA and the UK, have done to what was once, up until the late 1980s, one of the most stable and progressive countries on the south of the Mediterranean. In common with most Arab states it was run by an extremely firm dictatorship, but the list of advantages obtained by the general population, not least an element of religious freedom, was vast in comparison with most of its neighbours.
The contrast with Libya today could not be more stark. In the western part there is a government recognised by the western powers, but dysfunctional and whose leader shows a great reluctance to embrace democracy; in the east there is a tough, well armed regime totally unequipped with the mechanisms and resources to deal with a disaster on the scale which has occurred. Our own and the American governments have a massive responsibility for creating this situation and their cowardly silence is disgusting.
I first learned a bit about Libya in the late 1980s when I acquired the practice of an old solicitor friend who was dying of cancer and his clients included a Glasgow based oil engineer, who worked there. Soon after, the Lockerbie disaster took place, and I have followed developments more or less constantly since. My interest has taken me to some strange places, including live late night Libyan TV last December.
In the ensuing decades that oil industry has been one of two elements that ensured that Libya obtained the unwanted attention of western politicians. The second was the accumulation of massive reserves of gold, leading to fears that the ruler, Colonel Qaddafi, might upset the balance of international money markets by giving African countries a slice of the action.
Gaddafi didn’t have many friends among the western powers in those days. There was evidence that he had armed the IRA, also the suspicion that he had links with the East German regime, allegedly having financed one of the early pirate radio stations, which ran a listening service off the south coast of England. Later, a ship he had paid for, the Mebo II, came to a watery end in the Mediterranean.
I will not lengthen this post by rehearsing the known facts about the disaster over Lockerbie in December 1988; for that please refer to Professor Robert Black’s excellent blog, lockerbiecase.blogspot.com, and his Facebook page, Friends of Justice for Megrahi. Anyone new to the issues should start by reading yesterday’s post on that page, the essay from the indefatigable Dr Jim Swire.
From very soon after the tragedy it became clear that Margaret Thatcher’s government had a very obvious incentive to save the recent privatisation of Heathrow Airport from becoming mired in suggestions that security there had perhaps been less than perfect. The aircraft had taken off from there; if the explosion had been caused by a bomb it had to have been loaded there. At the fatal accident inquiry that followed, steps were taken successfully to protect the Tory government’s pet project.
At first the blame for the disaster seemed to be pinned, quite convincingly, on Iran taking revenge for the downing by an American warship of a flight full of Moslem pilgrims. It was only later that the official agenda changed to Libya.
The ghastly truth is that while the disaster was the utmost tragedy for all those who lost loved ones, it has proved highly convenient for the West. Further, the fact that the plane went down over Scotland has enabled Westminster politicians from Tony Blair, Jack Straw to John Major and others to indulge in international power play, while blaming Scotland when it didn’t suit. The plane went down in the 38th minute of the flight; a couple of minutes later she’d have fallen into the Atlantic and the implications would have been matters for English and International, rather than Scots, law. That useful fact has been exploited to the full ever since. The prime example is Blair’s “Deal in the Desert”, over oil, where Scotland’s legal system and devolved government were ignored until our politicians became useful suckers, Kenny MacAskill a prime example over the release of the terminally ill Megrahi.
I’d suggest that virtually everyone who has looked at the case, lawyers and others, apart from those in government and mainstream media circles, has had very serious concerns about the conviction, many having concluded that Megrahi was truly the 271st victim. But that’s not why I’m writing this today; my concern is that the whole story, including the case, shows the extent to which our Scottish institutions are extremely vulnerable to outside pressures. Here are a few examples, from immediately after the disaster up to the present.
Within hours, certainly a day, of the plane going down over Lockerbie a couple of days before Christmas, American operatives were on the scene, heavily involved in the search and clearing operations, there being patently no survivors to be rescued. Their identity has never been disclosed. There were, and remain, suspicions that items, including a suitcase and perhaps even a body, were removed. The reputation of an extremely decent doctor, who got unavoidably involved, was traduced by Lord Peter Fraser over this.
Over the years American experts “helped” to identify a crucial item of evidence, in highly suspicious circumstances. A decade after the disaster, American prosecutors worked with the Scottish team in putting the case against the two Libyans together, charged as a conspiracy with others unknown, and we all know the outcome. The court at Camp Zeist was fed a bizarre story about the bomb taking off on a feeder flight from Malta, passing through Frankfurt, and arriving in Heathrow many hours later. To achieve this feat it was equipped not with one of the atmospheric triggers then known to be in use, which would have gone off after the first take-off, but with a mechanical timer. The slightest delay would have resulted in a totally different scenario.
Thanks to a tragic mistake by the Libyans, it was agreed that the story would be put to a panel of Scottish judges, rather than to a judge and jury as is normal. The group of four, three with votes, the fourth there as a form of life insurance, were elderly men who worked together daily, had similar school backgrounds, social circles and who lived quietly as neighbours. It’s probably the first and only time in Scottish history where this has happened in a serious case.
Imagine the scene. The prosecution has put forward a story that seems very odd, particularly as security failures at a couple of foreign airports are involved. There were some holes in it, for example the judges were particularly impressed at the level of security at Luca airport in Malta and there was no evidence about how the bomb went round it. One of the prosecution witnesses, Giaka, was revealed to be a CIA agent with a dubious track record, something the Scottish Lord Advocate (now Lord Boyd of Duncansby) had done his best to conceal until forced to disclose it. That evidence was not accepted, except insofar as it left a suspicion on Mr Megrahi.
In front of them, the judges could see the American and Scottish prosecutors sitting there, the latter well known to them personally, presenting a case that had the obvious backing of the government the former represented, from a super-state that they had been brought up to respect, as saviours of the free world. The alternative was unthinkable, that the story was a total fabrication. Even so, the case against Megarhi’s co-accused was so weak they couldn’t accept it. Megrahi’s counsel failed in that killer motion, that in his client’s case the evidence was also, simply insufficient. This failure probably resulted in the loss of the first appeal a couple of years later.
My own view, and that of many lawyers I know, is that the judges weren’t corrupt in any way; instead they were victims of groupthink. The case illustrates that when it comes to determining the truth, judges are no better nor worse than anyone else, in fact perhaps worse because of their education, training and backgrounds. A jury drawn more or less at random and given proper directions will always seem a better option.
The matter of most concern in all this, I suggest, is the ease with which an admittedly friendly state gained access to the Scottish justice system at the highest level, without anyone publicly expressing the least concern. American operatives were physically present within the Crown Office over extended periods and in a position to listen to our lawyers and civil servants, study their behaviour, assess their qualities. It would have been astonishing if they hadn’t been aware of stories about senior Scottish lawyers circulating around the time. Given what we know about American involvement in the affairs of other small countries it would be surprising had these officials not used everything in their power to drive the case forward.
As is public knowledge, the then Lord Advocate, Andrew Hardie, resigned abruptly a couple of weeks before the trial was due to begin in February 2000. He has never disclosed the reason, but in an article in the Sunday Herald, Neil Mackay suggested it was because he had become aware of the CIA control over Giaka, which eventually in September deadlocked the trial and nearly derailed it. We will never know the reason why Hardie resigned, but one suspects that as a decent, honest and principled lawyer he was simply unwilling to run a dishonest case. I won’t comment on what that says about those who then ran it.
This dreadful Lockerbie case continues to leave a stink over Scottish justice. In recent months an elderly and very sick official of the Qaddafi regime, Mas’ud, who had recently been released from prison in Libya, was kidnapped by a group of armed gangsters, who promptly sold him to some slightly less disreputable middlemen, who sold him to the United States. He now awaits trial in Washington. The present Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, declared in Holyrood that she had no concerns about this procedure.
The above article was first published on Iain Lawson’s blog at:
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SEE ALSO:
by Chris Welzenbach (COUNTERPUNCH, Oct 5, 2016)
« Prior to the fall of Gaddafi, oil-rich Libya had cash reserves of $150 billion, and there were 143 tons of gold in Gaddafi’s vaults. As Pougala wrote in his Pambazuka News piece: “[A large portion of this money] had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation—the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years.” […] After March 31, 2011 the United States enforced the “no-fly” zone over Libya, ostensibly to aid a legitimate uprising and to evict from power a bloodthirsty dictator, but the resulting attacks went much further than simply bringing down Gaddafi. On July 18, 2011 NATO targeted the Great Man-Made River, a massive irrigation project that brought water to thousands of acres of arid land. The warplanes that perpetrated this heinous act not only destroyed a vital piece of Libya’s infrastructure but on July 22, 2011 also destroyed a factory that according to Ellen Brown in her March 14, 2016 account for The Ecologist produced the only pipes necessary to repair it. This vicious, wanton devastation served no practical purpose whatsoever save for collectively punishing the Libyan people. »
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