Another Lockerbie Doubter, This Time...

..in a highly respected U.S. publication.

You may wonder why I may seem obsessed with the doubts over the guilt of al-Meghari the Libyan convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 whose wreckage was scattered over Lockerbie, Scotland along with the remains of 259 passengers and crew including 189 Americans and 66 children of all nations.

What surprizes me, although I guess it shouldn’t, is that so few reporters or media seem to care about the doubts I’ve reported on in two previous posts, most comprehensively detailed in The London Review of Books September, 24 issue. People can’t live with uncertainty! They crave certainty more than they crave truth. Even if it might mean giving mass-murdering terrorists a free pass.

Now at last a serious U.S. publication has aired the doubts. In the current issue of The New York Review of Books Malise Ruthven carefully explains why the case against the Libyan was far from solid and has been falling apart ever since his conviction,

More rapidly since 2007 when the key witness who supposedly linked the Libyan to a bomb component admitted he’d committed perjury at the trial, and an exhaustive 800 page review of the case by a Scottish judicial commission concluded that “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”. And yet I saw none of this in any of the reporting on the Libyan’s release here in the states.

Why frame the Libyan when so much evidence pointed to a Syrian based terrorist group? The most plausible answer suggests Ruthven and the London review is that the crime was subcontracted by Iran to a Syrian terrorist group to get revenge for the accidental shootdown of an Iranian airliner by a US warship five months before the Lockerbie bombing. And that by the time of the trial, the Gulf War coalition was gathering and surprize, Syria was on board and Libya was supporting Saddam. I don’t know how much truth there is to this, But nobody seems concerned about finding out. In fact one of the conditions for al-Meghari’s release was that he drop his appeal of his conviction, an appeal in which some uncomfortable facts may have come out, uncomfortable for the UK and maybe the US.

That yes there was a corrupt deal behind the release, but it involved bargaining not over oil but over historical truth–and justice for the families of the victims, many of whom are suing now to find the truth. It may be the last chance given the refusal of the most of the mainstream media to care.