Lockerbie Case
Aug 25, 2010
The Lockerbie case has been in the news recently, based on the claim that BP was a force in getting Britain to allow the release, on allegedly compassionate grounds, of the Libyan, AbdelBasset Ali Al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103. The news reports on this revival of the case all stress the BP and commercial factors influencing the British decision, along with the fact that Al-Megrahi was the only person convicted of that crime (a model is John Burns’s "BP Faces New Scrutiny in Lockerbie Case: Confirms Role in Release of Only Man Convicted in ’88 Bombing," NYT, July 16, 2010). Burns and his colleagues regularly ignore the context, which suggests that Al-Megrahi is innocent, that the 2001 trial in which he was convicted was a judicial farce and overwhelmingly politicized, and that a 2007 Scottish Review Commission had found six separate grounds on which the 2001 decision may have been a miscarriage of justice. There is a very good chance that the 2001 decision would have been overturned, which would have been awkward for British and U.S. officials. The deal precluded this embarrassment.
The bombing of Pan Am 103 followed by five and a half months the U.S. shooting down of Iranian Air Flight 655, with the loss of 290 civilian lives. It is of interest that this bombing resulted in no international sanctions or even reprimands and that the naval commander of the USS Vincennes, Captain Will Rogers, who carried out this action, was not only greeted as a hero on his return to the U.S., he got the Legion of Merit for "exceptionally meritorious service." Al-Megrahi was never treated publicly in Libya as a hero before or after his trial, but his welcome in Libya after his compassionate release made the U.S. mainstream media furious.
Although Iran and its agents in Syria and West Germany were initially believed and claimed to be the Pan Am 103 bombers (a convincing case and evidence was produced in support of this plausible line of thought), in 1989 and 1990 political changes in the Middle East (U.S. hostages in Lebanon, the Gulf War with Iraq) made a Western rapprochement with Syria and Iran important. Lo and behold, the case against Iran, Syria, and the PLFP in West Germany suddenly faded away, and the case was built against Libya, always a convenient scapegoat. This case against Libya was "circumstantial," but, more importantly, corrupt. The Scottish crime scene was violated by an immediate swarm of U.S. agents, the evidence was dealt with by both U.S. and British experts who had earlier been guilty of doctoring evidence, and the CIA’s reluctantly disclosed Libyan witness was shown to be a liar, among other serious weaknesses with the case (see Paul Foot, "The Flight From Justice," Private Eye, May/June 2001, and John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2001).
Scottish law professor Robert Black, who had helped arrange for the trial, called the 2001 decision "the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for a hundred years." UN observer Hans Kochler found the decision "totally incomprehensible." But neither Kochler nor Black were cited in the New York Times and this travesty was institutionalized as valid international justice in the mainstream media. Al-Megrahi is still today "the Lockerbie bomber" who spent 10 years in a Scottish prison, while Vincennes Captain Will Rogers remains untouchable and a hero.
In the New World Order, with a single over-militarized superpower aggressively projecting power on many fronts, without any containing rival, and spinning out of control, the global systems of justice yield remarkably perverse results.
https://znetwork.org/zmagazine/the-global-in-justice-system-by-edward-herman/
Responses « Back to index | View thread »