“Lockerbie Bomber” case getting fishier and fishier

A while back I wrote an essay here titled Angry about the “Lockerbie bomber” getting released? because, well, the media was able to ramp up quite a spectacle of anger and indignation regarding the dying man who was convicted of the attack being released.  

The whole case has been fishy from the very beginning, and now?   Well, flying well under the radar of the so-called “media” in this country (after all, a juicy blackmail story involving a celebrity is far more important than anything else in the world) are new revelations that key witnesses in Megrahi’s conviction were paid just a TON of money for their testimony.

Once again, it’s the UK media, and not the American, that actually manages to cover this:

Two key figures in the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber were secretly given rewards of up to $3m (£1.9m) in a deal discussed by Scottish detectives and the US government, according to legal papers released today.

The claims about the payments were revealed in a dossier of evidence that was intended to be used in an appeal by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.

Megrahi abandoned his appeal last month after the Libyan and Scottish governments struck a deal to free him on compassionate grounds because he is terminally ill with prostate cancer. Now in hospital in Tripoli, Megrahi said he wanted the public to see the evidence which he claims would have cleared him.

“I continue to protest my innocence – how could I fail to do so?,” he said. “I have no desire to add to the upset of many people I know are profoundly affected by what happened in Lockerbie. My intention is only for the truth to be made known.”

The documents published online by Megrahi’s lawyers today show that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was asked to pay $2m to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who gave crucial evidence at the trial suggesting that Megrahi had bought clothes later used in the suitcase that allegedly held the Lockerbie bomb.

The DoJ was also asked to pay a further $1m to his brother, Paul Gauci, who did not give evidence but played a major role in identifying the clothing and in “maintaining the resolve of his brother”. The DoJ said their rewards could be increased and that the brothers were also eligible for the US witness protection programme, according to the documents.

The previously secret payments were uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which returned Megrahi’s conviction to the court of appeal in 2007 as a suspected miscarriage of justice. Many references were in private diaries kept by the detectives involved, Megrahi’s lawyers said, but not their official notebooks.

So the money came from the United States.  Gee, what a surprise.

I’m kidding, of course (about it being a surprise), because the CIA and the FBI were behind this entire deception.  Key evidence in the Lockerbie case was evidently planted by the CIA:

Crucial evidence against two Libyans for the Lockerbie bombing was planted by the CIA, it was claimed in the Commons yesterday.

A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb’s timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: “I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans … I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant.”

Why, you might ask, would the CIA do a LIHOP with Lockerbie?   Well, in a comment at the previous diary I wrote, our very own halef puts it succinctly:

The discrepancy in reaction between UK and US (4.00 / 1)

bereaved families comes from the fact that the UK families have far better information on the story, and few of them now believe that Megrahi had anything significant to do with it.  The common belief is that Iran was behind the attack, and that it was a revenge for the USS Vincennes shooting down a civilian Iranian Airbus over Iranian airspace with the loss of 290 men, women and children.    That Ronald Reagan decorated the captain of the Vincennes and refused to pay compensation cannot have helped.

Immediately after Lockerbie, European intelligence pointed the finger at Syria and Iran, but not Libya.  The drumbeat against Libya came later.

Of course, the circus Gaddafi organised on Megrahi’s return did not go down well in Britain.  But that has nothing to do with the underlying issue.

That was the key to Lockerbie — our shooting down of a civilian Iranian jetliner full of passengers, by the U.S.S. Vincennes.    There are a lot of people now too young to even remember this.  But it was quite horrific.   There was a great deal of video of bloated civilian bodies bobbing in the waters:

The plane blew up six miles from the Vincennes, the wreckage falling in Iranian territorial waters.

Iranian ships and helicopters have been searching for survivors but none have so far been found. Iranian television broadcast scenes of bodies floating amid scattered debris.

Iran has reacted with outrage, accusing the United States of a “barbaric massacre” and vowed to “avenge the blood of our martyrs”.

So it seems the CIA did a LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) and then conveniently blamed it on Libya and this patsy Megrahi.  

Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the UN Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.

“It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys,” Sharf wrote.

“The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove.”

“It was largely based on this inside guy [Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka]. It wasn’t until the trial that I learned this guy was a nut-job and that the CIA had absolutely no confidence in him and that they knew he was a liar.”

More here.

I know nobody gives a rats ass about any of this, but I just have to share it with whoever the hell cares about the truth.  Just one more example of the Black side of our government killing people to further an agenda, and lying to us about it perpetuate the “myth” that they want to perpetuate.   In this case it appears a planeload of innocent civilians were deliberately murdered, sacrificed to “smooth things over” with Iran.   And then, being the opportunists they are, conveniently blamed the act on a new “enemy”.    Nice, huh?   That’s our country for ya!