5.9.09

Lockerbie – the Truth

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and the Elephant in the Room.

Comment by Dave Roberts SLP vice-president

The press and media are full of hysteria over the release of the convicted “Lockerbie bomber”. The moralising outrage stretches across the Atlantic. The Scottish Justice minister is being slated for going soft on terrorism by senior FBI officials, the SNP and Scotland are being threatened with international isolation and even pariah status. Mandelson, Brown, Blair and Straw are being accused of doing a grubby back room deal with the Libyans for oil contracts in exchange for the release of the “greatest murderer” in British History.

To add to their squirming misery Saif Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi’s second son has confirmed to the world’s media that al- Megrahi’s release has been on the table of every oil trade negotiation meeting during the last two years.

So has the Scottish and British establishment completely lost the plot and are they going soft on terrorism? Is the frantic scramble for oil now so paramount that it threatens a British rift with the US establishment?
In the smoke and mirrors of what passes for international diplomacy what is actually going on?

The answer is simple, if not even more troublesome for the British and American establishments and many of their media sycophants who insisted throughout the Lockerbie case in elevating their journalism to the dizzy heights of the gutter.

The enormous elephant in the room that at the moment everyone is painfully trying to ignore is that al Megrahi is an innocent man and in that sense yet another victim of the Lockerbie bombing and the whole world was about to be told it and shown it.

Terminally ill he was given the opportunity of release on compassionate grounds in return for dropping his appeal. An appeal that would have proved that he was innocent, that he was fitted up by the British and American Governments in what Professor Robert Black (the lawyer responsible for brokering the deal for the two accused of the bombing to stand trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law) describes as one of the greatest travesties of justice in the history of the Scottish Judicial System.

An appeal that was welcomed by Dr Jim Swire .who lost his 28 year old daughter Flora in the bombing and who represents many of the families of the British victims because he knows al-Megrahi to be innocent, an appeal that would have shown that it was the British and American governments that engaged in a grubby deal with Syria and Iran to keep them out of Gulf War1 by lifting arms and trade sanctions and dropping the investigation into their involvement in the Lockerbie bombings. Until that time the investigation had centred on an Iranian sponsored Syrian/Palestinian revenge attack for the mass murder of 290 Iranian pilgrims when their civilian airliner was shot down by the American aircraft carrier Vincennes.

This grubby deal was done to allow the Americans to invade Iraq without Syrian and Iranian intervention and the investigation was conveniently realigned, pointing the finger at Libya, which paved the way for the American and British to commit mass murder in Iraq.

This is the substantive truth of the case which the British and American establishment fear would surface in any appeal. A truth that many of the victims’ families are painfully aware of and now demand the evidence.

Dr Jim Swire often quotes a telling fact from Thatcher’s biography in which she triumphantly claims that since in the face of international condemnation, she agreed to join the Americans in the bombing of Tripoli Benghazi and much of costal Libya and specifically the targeting of Gaddafi’s home, a raid which left his 7 year old daughter dead, and another 280 civilians killed, “Libya had not been involved in any further attacks on western interests”.

Unfortunately for Mrs Thatcher, if the fabrication of Libyan involvement is to be believed, she seems to have forgotten that the biggest single attack on Western interests before 9/11, involving an American plane in British airspace and a death toll of 270, took place nearly 24 months after the bombing of Tripoli. Unless of course she knows something different?

It is Kafkaesque for Jack Straw, who with the rest of the Labour government has conspired to keep an innocent man in jail for 8 years whilst ensuring that the war criminal General Pinochet goes free, is titled the Minister for Justice. Some Minister, Some justice !

Open the files, for a non- redacted public enquiry now and show some real compassion and justice for all the Lockerbie victims including Abdel Basset al- Megrahi!

Ends.