The Maltese Double Cross (1994) - Lockerbie

The Maltese Double Cross was written, directed and produced by the late Allan Francovich.

Faced with threats of legal action, it has been given scant exposure in the UK and the US. It was shown on Channel 4 in the UK in 1995 and was followed by a discussion on the issues the film raised. This was chaired by Sheena McDonald and included Allan Francovich, Jim Swire, Sir Teddy Taylor, Jim Duggan, David Leppard and Oliver 'Buck' Revel. Sadly, the discussion subsequent to the film is not included below.

This is however the best version of the 1994 film available.

The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103 - Case Not Closed

by William Blum.

The newspapers were filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of the December 21, 1988 bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. A Libyan, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi,had been found guilty of the crime the day before, January 31,2001, by a Scottish court in the Hague, though his co-defendant,Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. At long last there was going to be some kind of closure for the families.

But what was wrong with this picture?


What was wrong was that the evidence against Megrahi was thin to the point of transparency. Coming the month after the(s)election of George W. Bush, the Hague verdict could have been dubbed Supreme Court II, another instance of non-judicial factors fatally clouding judicial reasoning. The three Scottish judges could not have relished returning to the United Kingdom after finding both defendants innocent of the murder of 270 people,largely from the U.K. and the United States. Not to mention having to face dozens of hysterical victims' family members in the courtroom. The three judges also well knew the fervent desires of the White House and Downing Street as to the outcome. If both men had been acquitted, the United States and Great Britain would have had to answer for a decade of sanctions and ill will directed toward Libya.


One has to read the entire 26,000-word "Opinion of the Court", as well as being very familiar with the history of the case going back to 1988, to appreciate how questionable was the judges' verdict.

The key charge against Megrahi -- the sine qua non -- was that he placed explosives in a suitcase and tagged it so it would lead the following charmed life: 1)loaded aboard an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt without an accompanying passenger;2)transferred in Frankfurt to the PanAm 103A flight to London without an accompanying passenger; 3)transferred in London to the PanAm 103 flight to New York without an accompanying passenger.


To the magic bullet of the JFK assassination, can we now add the magic suitcase?


This scenario by itself would have been a major feat and so unlikely to succeed that any terrorist with any common sense would have found a better way. But aside from anything else, we have this -- as to the first step, loading the suitcase at Malta:there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints,nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him or Fhimah to such an act.


And the court admitted it: "The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta] is a major difficulty for the Crown case."{1}


Moreover, under security requirements in 1988, unaccompanied baggage was subjected to special X-ray examinations, plus --because of recent arrests in Germany -- the security personnel in Frankfurt were on the lookout specifically for a bomb secreted in a radio, which turned out to indeed be the method used with the PanAm 103 bomb.



Requiring some sort of direct and credible testimony linking Megrahi to the bombing, the Hague court placed great -- nay,paramount -- weight upon the supposed identification of the Libyan by a shopkeeper in Malta, as the purchaser of the clothing found in the bomb suitcase. But this shopkeeper had earlier identified several other people as the culprit, including one who was a CIA agent.{1a} When he finally identified Megrahi from a photo, it was after Megrahi's photo had been in the world news for years. The court acknowledged the possible danger inherentin such a verification: "These identifications were criticised inter alia on the ground that photographs of the accused have featured many times over the years in the media and accordingly purported identifications more than 10 years after the event are of little if any value."{2}



There were also major discrepancies between the shopkeeper's original description of the clothes-buyer and Megrahi's actual appearance. The shopkeeper told police that the customer was"six feet or more in height" and "was about 50 years of age."Megrahi was 5'8" tall and was 36 in 1988. The judges again acknowledged the weakness of their argument by conceding that the initial description "would not in a number of respects fit the first accused [Megrahi]" and that "it has to be accepted that there was a substantial discrepancy."{3}



Nevertheless, the judges went ahead and accepted the identification as accurate. Before the indictment of the two Libyans in Washington in November 1991, the press had reported police findings that the clothing had been purchased on November 23, 1988.{4}



But the indictment of Megrahi states that he made the purchase on December 7. Can this be because the investigators were able to document Megrahi being in Malta (where he worked for Libya Airlines) on that date but cannot do so for November 23?{5}



There is also this to be considered -- If the bomber needed some clothing to wrap up an ultra-secret bomb in a suitcase,would he go to a clothing store in the city where he planned to carry out his dastardly deed, where he knew he'd likely be remembered as an obvious foreigner, and buy brand new, easily traceable items? Would an intelligence officer -- which Megrahiwas alleged to be -- do this? Or even a common boob? Wouldn't it make more sense to use any old clothing, from anywhere? Furthermore, after the world was repeatedly assured that these items of clothing were sold only on Malta, it was learned that at least one of the items was actually "sold at dozens of outlets throughout Europe, and it was impossible to trace the purchaser."{6}



The "Opinion of the Court" placed considerable weight on the suspicious behavior of Megrahi prior to the fatal day, making much of his comings and goings abroad, phone calls to unknown parties for unknown reasons, the use of a pseudonym, etc.The three judges tried to squeeze as much mileage out of these events as they could, as if they had no better case to make.But if Megrahi was indeed a member of Libyan intelligence, we must consider that intelligence agents have been known to act in mysterious ways, for whatever assignment they're on. The court,however, had no idea what assignment, if any, Megrahi was working on.



There is much more that is known about the case that makes the court verdict and written opinion questionable, although credit must be given the court for its frankness about what it was doing, even while it was doing it. "We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications," the judges wrote. "We arealso aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified."{7}



It is remarkable, given all that the judges conceded was questionable or uncertain in the trial -- not to mention all that was questionable or uncertain that they didn't concede -- that at the end of the day they could still declare to the world that"There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of [Megrahi]".{8}



The Guardian of London later wrote that two days before the verdict, "senior Foreign Office officials briefed a group of journalists in London. They painted a picture of a bright new chapter in Britain's relations with Colonel Gadafy's regime. They made it quite clear they assumed both the Libyans in the dock would be acquitted. The Foreign Office officials were not alone. Most independent observers believed it was impossible for the court to find the prosecution had proved its case against Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt."{9}



There is, moreover, an alternative scenario, laying the blame on Palestinians, Iran and Syria, which is much better documented and makes a lot more sense, logistically and otherwise. Indeed, this was the Original Official Version, delivered with Olympian rectitude by the U.S. government -- guaranteed,sworn to, scout's honor, case closed -- until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed.



Washington was anxious as well to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking became audible in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly -- or so it seemed -- in October 1990, there was aNew Official Version:



It was Libya -- the Arab state least supportive of the U.S. build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq -- that was behind the bombing after all,declared Washington.



The two Libyans were formally indicted in the U.S. and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. "This was a Libyan government operation from start to finish," declared the State Department spokesman.{10}



"The Syrians took a bum rap on this," said President GeorgeH.W. Bush.{11}



Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.



The Original Official Version accused the PFLP-GC, a 1968breakaway from a component of the Palestine Liberation Organization, of making the bomb and somehow placing it aboard the flight in Frankfurt.



The PFLP-GC was led by Ahmed Jabril, one of the world's leading terrorists, and was headquartered in, financed by, and closely supported by, Syria. The bombing was allegedly done at the behest of Iran as revenge for the U.S. shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane over the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1988,which claimed 290 lives.



The support for this scenario was, and remains, impressive,as the following sample indicates: In April 1989, the FBI -- in response to criticism that it was bungling the investigation -- leaked to CBS the news that it had tentatively identified the person who unwittingly carried the bomb aboard.



His name was Khalid Jaafar, a 21-year-old Lebanese-American. The report said that the bomb had been planted in Jaafar's suitcase by a member of the PFLP-GC, whose name was not revealed.{12}



In May, the State Department stated that the CIA was"confident" of the Iran-Syria-PFLP-GC account of events.{13}



On Sept. 20, The Times of London reported that "security officials from Britain, the United States and West Germany are 'totally satisfied' that it was the PFLP-GC" behind the crime. In December 1989, Scottish investigators announced that theyhad "hard evidence" of the involvement of the PFLP-GC in the bombing.{14}



A National Security Agency electronic intercept disclosed that Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, Iranian interior minister, had paid Palestinian terrorists $10 million dollars to gain revenge for the downed Iranian airplane.(15)



The intercept appears to have occurred in July 1988, shortly after the downing of the Iranian plane. Israeli intelligence also intercepted a communication between Mohtashemi and the Iranian embassy in Beirut "indicating that Iran paid for the Lockerbie bombing."{16}



Even after the Libyans had been indicted, Israeli officials declared that their intelligence analysts remained convinced that the PFLP-GC bore primary responsibility for the bombing.{17}



In 1992, Abu Sharif, a political adviser to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, stated that the PLO had compiled a secret report which concluded that the bombing of 103 was the work of a "MiddleEastern country" other than Libya.{18}



In February 1995, former Scottish Office minister, Alan Stewart, wrote to the British Foreign Secretary and the Lord Advocate, questioning the reliability of evidence which had led to the accusations against the two Libyans. This move, wrote The Guardian, reflected the concern of the Scottish legal profession,reaching into the Crown Office (Scotland's equivalent of the Attorney General's Office), that the bombing may not have been the work of Libya, but of Syrians, Palestinians and Iranians.{19}



We must also ask why Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,writing in her 1993 memoirs about the US bombing of Libya in1986, with which Britain had cooperated, stated: "But the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place. Gaddafy had not been destroyed but he had been humbled. There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years."{20}

A key question in the PFLP-GC version has always been: How did the bomb get aboard the plane in Frankfurt, or at some other point? One widely disseminated explanation was in a report, completed during the summer of 1989 and leaked in the fall, which had been prepared by a New York investigating firm called Interfor. Headed by a former Israeli intelligence agent, Juval Aviv, Interfor -- whose other clients included Fortune 500companies, the FBI, IRS and Secret Service{21} -- was hired by the law firm representing Pan Am's insurance carrier.

The Interfor Report said that in the mid-1980s, a drug and arms smuggling operation was set up in various European cities,with Frankfurt airport as the site of one of the drug routes. The Frankfurt operation was run by Manzer Al-Kassar, a Syrian,the same man from whom Oliver North's shadowy network purchased large quantities of arms for the contras. At the airport, according to the report, a courier would board a flight with checked luggage containing innocent items; after the luggage had passed all security checks, one or another accomplice Turkish baggage handler for PanAm would substitute an identical suitcase containing contraband; the passenger then picked up this suitcase upon arrival at the destination.

The only courier named by Interfor was Khalid Jaafar, who, as noted above, had been named by the FBI a few months earlier as the person who unwittingly carried the bomb aboard.

The Interfor report spins a web much too lengthy and complex to go into here. The short version is that the CIA in Germany discovered the airport drug operation and learned also that Kassar had the contacts to gain the release of American hostages in Lebanon. He had already done the same for French hostages. Thus it was, that the CIA and the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA,Federal Criminal Office) allowed the drug operation to continue in hopes of effecting the release of American hostages. According to the report, this same smuggling ring and its method of switching suitcases at the Frankfurt airport were used to smuggle the fatal bomb aboard flight 103, under the eyes ofthe CIA and BKA.

In January 1990, Interfor gave three of the baggage handlers polygraphs and two of them were judged as being deceitful when denying any involvement in baggage switching. However, neither the U.S., UK or German investigators showed any interest in the results, or in questioning the baggage handlers. Instead, the polygrapher, James Keefe, was hauled before a Washington grand jury, and, as he puts it, "They were bent on destroying my credibility -- not theirs" [the baggage handlers].

To Interfor,the lack of interest in the polygraph results and the attempt at intimidation of Keefe was the strongest evidence of a cover-up by the various government authorities who did not want their permissive role in the baggage switching to be revealed.{22}

Critics claimed that the Interfor report had been inspired by PanAm's interest in proving that it was impossible for normal airline security to have prevented the loading of the bomb, thus removing the basis for accusing the airline of negligence.

The report was the principal reason PanAm's attorneys subpoenaed the FBI, CIA, DEA, State Department, National Security Council, and NSA, as well as, reportedly, the Defense Intelligence Agency and FAA, to turn over all documents relating to the crash of 103 or to a drug operation preceding the crash. The government moved to quash the subpoenas on grounds of"national security", and refused to turn over a single document in open court, although it gave some to a judge to view privately.

The judge later commented that he was "troubled about certain parts" of what he'd read, adding "I don't know quite what to do because I think some of the material may be significant."{23}

On October 30, 1990, NBC-TV News reported that "PanAm flights from Frankfurt, including 103, had been used a number of times by the DEA as part of its undercover operation to fly informants and suitcases of heroin into Detroit as part of a sting operation to catch dealers in Detroit."

The TV network reported that the DEA was looking into the possibility that a young man who lived in Michigan and regularly visited the Middle East may have unwittingly carried the bomb aboard flight 103. His name was Khalid Jaafar. "Unidentified law enforcement sources" were cited as saying that Jaafar had been a DEA informant and was involved in a drug-sting operation based out of Cyprus. The DEA was investigating whether the PFLP-GC had tricked Jaafar into carrying a suitcase containing the bomb instead of the drugs he usually carried.

The NBC report quoted an airline source as saying:"Informants would put [suit]cases of heroin on the PanAm flights apparently without the usual security checks, through an arrangement between the DEA and German authorities."{24}

These revelations were enough to inspire a congressional hearing, held in December, entitled, "Drug Enforcement Administration's Alleged Connection to the PanAm Flight 103Disaster".

The chairman of the committee, Cong. Robert Wise (Dem., W.VA.), began the hearing by lamenting the fact that the DEA and the Department of Justice had not made any of their field agentswho were most knowledgeable about flight 103 available to testify; that they had not provided requested written information, including the results of the DEA's investigation into the air disaster; and that "the FBI to this date has been totally uncooperative".

The two DEA officials who did testify admitted that theagency had, in fact, run "controlled drug deliveries" through Frankfurt airport with the cooperation of German authorities,using U.S. airlines, but insisted that no such operation had been conducted in December 1988. (The drug agency had said nothing of its sting operation to the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism which had held hearings in the first months of 1990 in response to the 103 bombing.)

The officials denied that the DEA had had any "association with Mr. Jaafar in any way, shape, or form." However, to questions concerning Jaafar's background, family, and his frequent trips to Lebanon, they asked to respond only in closed session. They made the same request in response to several other questions.{25}

NBC News had reported on October 30 that the DEA had toldlaw enforcement officers in Detroit not to talk to the mediaabout Jaafar.

The hearing ended after but one day, even though Wise hadpromised a "full-scale" investigation and indicated during thehearing that there would be more to come. What was said in theclosed sessions remains closed.{26}

One of the DEA officials who testified, Stephen Greene, had himself had a reservation on flight 103, but he canceled because of one or more of the several international warnings that had preceded the fateful day. He has described standing on theHeathrow tarmac, watching the doomed plane take off.{27} There have been many reports of heroin being found in the field around the crash, from "traces" to "a substantial quantity"found in a suitcase.{28} Two days after the NBC report, however,the New York Times quoted a "federal official" saying that "no hard drugs were aboard the aircraft."

In 1994, American filmmaker Allan Francovich completed adocumentary, "The Maltese Double Cross", which presents Jaafar asan unwitting bomb carrier with ties to the DEA and the CIA. Showings of the film in Britain were canceled under threat of lawsuits, venues burglarized or attacked by arsonists. When Channel4 agreed to show the film, the Scottish Crown Office and the U.S.Embassy in London sent press packs to the media, labeling thefilm "blatant propaganda" and attacking some of the film'sinterviewees, including Juval Aviv the head of Interfor.{29} Aviv paid a price for his report and his outspokenness.

Over a period of time, his New York office suffered a series ofbreak-ins, the FBI visited his clients, his polygrapher washarassed, as mentioned above, and a contrived commercial fraudcharge was brought against him. Even though Aviv eventually wascleared in court, it was a long, expensive, and painfulordeal.{30}

Francovich also stated that he had learned that five CIAoperatives had been sent to London and Cyprus to discredit thefilm while it was being made, that his office phones were tapped,that staff cars were sabotaged, and that one of his researchersnarrowly escaped an attempt to force his vehicle into the path ofan oncoming truck.{31}

Government officials examining the Lockerbie bombing went sofar as to ask the FBI to investigate the film. The Bureau laterissued a highly derogatory opinion of it.{32}

The film's detractors made much of the fact that the filmwas initially funded jointly by a UK company (two-thirds) and aLibyan government investment arm (one-third). Francovich saidthat he was fully aware of this and had taken pains to negotiatea guarantee of independence from any interference.

On April 17, 1997, Allan Francovich suddenly died of a heartattack at age 56, upon arrival at Houston Airport.{33} His film has had virtually no showings in the United States.

The DEA sting operation and Interfor's baggage-handler hypothesisboth predicate the bomb suitcase being placed aboard the plane inFrankfurt without going through the normal security checks. Ineither case, it eliminates the need for the questionabletriple-unaccompanied baggage scenario. With either scenario theclothing could still have been purchased in Malta, but in anyevent we don't need the Libyans for that.

Mohammed Abu Talb fits that and perhaps other pieces of thepuzzle. The Palestinian had close ties to PFLP-GC cells inGermany which were making Toshiba radio-cassette bombs, similar,if not identical, to what was used to bring down 103. In October1988, two months before Lockerbie, the German police raided thesecells, finding several such bombs. In May 1989, Talb wasarrested in Sweden, where he lived, and was later convicted oftaking part in several bombings of the offices of Americanairline companies in Scandinavia. In his Swedish flat, policefound large quantities of clothing made in Malta.

Police investigation of Talb disclosed that during October1988 he had been to Cyprus and Malta, at least once in thecompany of Hafez Dalkamoni, the leader of the German PFLP-GC, whowas arrested in the raid. The men met with PFLP-GC members wholived in Malta. Talb was also in Malta on November 23, which wasoriginally reported as the date of the clothing purchase beforethe indictment of the Libyans, as mentioned earlier.

After his arrest, Talb told investigators that betweenOctober and December 1988 he had retrieved and passed to anotherperson a bomb that had been hidden in a building used by thePFLP-GC in Germany. Officials declined to identify the person towhom Talb said he had passed the bomb. A month later, however,he recanted his confession.

Talb was reported to possess a brown Samsonite suitcase andto have circled December 21 in a diary seized in his Swedish flat. After the raid upon his flat, his wife was heard to telephonePalestinian friends and say: "Get rid of the clothes."

In December 1989, Scottish police, in papers filed withSwedish legal officials, made Talb the only publicly identifiedsuspect "in the murder or participation in the murder of 270people"; the Palestinian subsequently became another of theseveral individuals to be identified by the Maltese shopkeeperfrom a photo as the clothing purchaser.{34} Since that time, theworld has scarcely heard of Abu Talb, who was sentenced to lifein prison in Sweden, but never charged with anything to do with Lockerbie.

In Allan Francovich's film, members of Khalid Jaafar's family-- which long had ties to the drug trade in Lebanon's notoriousBekaa Valley -- are interviewed. In either halting English ortranslated Arabic, or paraphrased by the film's narrator, theydrop many bits of information, but which are difficult to puttogether into a coherent whole. Amongst the bits ... Khalid hadtold his parents that he'd met Talb in Sweden and had been givenMaltese clothing ... someone had given Khalid a tape recorder, orput one into his bag ... he was told to go to Germany to friendsof PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jabril who would help him earn some money... he arrived in Germany with two kilos of heroin ... "He didn'tknow it was a bomb. They gave him the drugs to take to Germany. He didn't know. Who wants to die?" ...

It can not be stated with certainty what happened atFrankfurt airport on that fateful day, if, as seems most likely,that is the place where the bomb was placed into the system. Either Jaafar, the DEA courier, arrived with his suitcase ofheroin and bomb and was escorted through security by the properauthorities, or this was a day he was a courier for Manzeral-Kassar, and the baggage handlers did their usual switch. Or perhaps we'll never know for sure what happened.

On February 16, 1990, a group of British relatives of Lockerbie victims went to the American Embassy in London for a meeting with members of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism. After the meeting, Britisher Martin Cadman was chatting with two of the commission members. He later reportedwhat one of them had said to him: "Your government and ourgovernment know exactly what happened at Lockerbie. But they are not going to tell you."{35}

Comments about the Hague Court verdict

"The judges nearly agreed with the defense. In their verdict, they tossed out much of the prosecution witnesses'evidence as false or questionable and said the prosecution had failed to prove crucial elements, including the route that thebomb suitcase took." -- New York Times analysis.{36} "It sure does look like they bent over backwards to find away to convict, and you have to assume the political context ofthe case influenced them." -- Michael Scharf, professor, NewEngland School of Law.{37}

"I thought this was a very, very weak circumstantial case. I am absolutely astounded, astonished. I was extremely reluctant to believe that any Scottish judge would convict anyone, even a Libyan, on the basis of such evidence." -- Robert Black, Scottish law professor who was the architect of the Hague trial.{38}

"A general pattern of the trial consisted in the fact thatvirtually all people presented by the prosecution as keywitnesses were proven to lack credibility to a very high extent,in certain cases even having openly lied to the court." "While the first accused was found 'guilty', the secondaccused was found 'not guilty'. ... This is totallyincomprehensible for any rational observer when one considersthat the indictment in its very essence was based on the jointaction of the two accused in Malta."

"As to the undersigned's knowledge, there is not a singlepiece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime. In such a context, the guilty verdict in regard to the firstaccused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational. ... This leadsthe undersigned to the suspicion that political considerationsmay have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of thecase ... Regrettably, through the conduct of the Court,disservice has been done to the important cause of internationalcriminal justice." -- Hans Koechler, appointed as an international observer of the Lockerbie Trial by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.{39}

So, let's hope that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi is really guilty. It would be a terrible shame if he spends the rest of his life in prison because back in 1990 Washington's hegemonicplans for the Middle East needed a convenient enemy, which just happened to be his country.

NOTES

1. "Opinion of the Court", Par. 39
1a. Mark Perry, Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA (Wm. Morrow, New York, 1992), pp.342-7.
2. "Opinion of the Court", Par. 55
3. "Opinion of the Court", Par. 68
4. See, e.g., Sunday Times (London), Nov. 12, 1989, p.3.
5. For a detailed discussion of this issue see, "A Special Reportfrom Private Eye: Lockerbie the Flight from Justice", May/June2001, pp.20-22; Private Eye is a magazine published in London.
6. Sunday Times (London), December 17, 1989, p. 14. Malta is, infact, a major manufacturer of clothing sold throughout the world.
7. "Opinion of the Court", Par. 89
8. Ibid.
9. The Guardian (London), June 19, 2001
10. New York Times, Nov. 15, 1991
11. Los Angeles Times, Nov. 15, 1991
12. New York Times, April 13, 1989, p.9; David Johnston,Lockerbie: The Tragedy of Flight 103 (New York, 1989), pp.157,161-2.
13. Washington Post, May 11, 1989, p. 1
14. New York Times, December 16, 1989, p.3.
15. Department of the Air Force -- Air Intelligence Agencyintelligence summary report, March 4, 1991, released under a FOIA request made by lawyers for PanAm. Reports of the interceptappeared in the press long before the above document wasreleased; see, e.g., New York Times, Sept. 27, 1989, p.11;October 31, 1989, p.8; Sunday Times, October 29, 1989, p.4. Butit wasn't until Jan. 1995 that the exact text became widelypublicized and caused a storm in the UK, although ignored in theU.S.
16. The Times (London), September 20, 1989, p.1
17. New York Times, November 21, 1991, p. 14. It should be bornein mind, however, that Israel may have been influenced because ofits hostility toward the PFLP-GC.
18. Reuters dispatch, datelined Tunis, Feb. 26, 1992
19. The Guardian, Feb. 24, 1995, p.7
20. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York, 1993),pp.448-9.
21. National Law Journal, Sept. 25, 1995, p.A11, from papersfiled in a New York court case.
22. Barron's (New York), December 17, 1990, pp.19, 22. A copy ofthe Interfor Report is in the author's possession, but he hasbeen unable to locate a complete copy of it on the Internet.
23. Barron's, op. cit., p. 18.
24. The Times (London), November 1, 1990, p.3; Washington Times,October 31, 1990, p.3
25. Government Information, Justice, and Agriculture Subcommitteeof the Committee on Government Operations, House ofRepresentatives, December 18, 1990, passim.
26. Ibid,
27. The film, "The Maltese Double Cross" (see below).
28. Sunday Times (London), April 16, 1989 (traces); Johnston, op.cit., p.79 (substantial). "The Maltese Double Cross" filmmentions other reports of drugs found, by a Scottish policemanand a mountain rescue man.
29. Financial Times (London), May 12, 1995, p.8 and article byJohn Ashton, leading 103 investigator, in The Mail on Sunday(London), June 9, 1996.
30. Ashton, op. cit.; Wall Street Journal, December 18, 1995,p.1, and December 18, 1996, p.B2 31. The Guardian (London), April 23, 1994, p.5
32. Sunday Times (London), May 7, 1995.
33. Francovich's former wife told the author that he had not hadany symptoms of a heart problem before. However, the author also spoke to Dr. Cyril Wecht, of JFK "conspiracy" fame, who performedan autopsy on Francovich. Wecht stated that he found no reason to suspect foul play.
34. Re: Abu Talb, all 1989: New York Times, Oct. 31, p.1, Dec. 1,p.12, Dec. 24, p.1; Sunday Times (London), Nov. 12, p.3, December5; The Times (London), Dec. 21, p.5. Also The Associated Press,July 11, 2000
35. Cadman in "The Maltese Double Cross". Also see The Guardian,July 29, 1995, p.27
36. New York Times, Feb. 2, 2001
37. Ibid.
38. Electronic Telegraph UK News, February 4, 2001
39. All quotations are from Koechler's report of February 3,2001, easily found on the Internet

Written by William Blum , author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions SinceWorld War II andRogue State: A Guide to the World's Only SuperpowerThis essay is a chapter in the book, Everything You Know Is Wrong,a sequel to the book You Are Being Lied To.

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/panam.htm

Al Kassar Appeal Rejected.

Spain's National Court rejects appeal by Syrian accused in U.S. of illegal arms deals.

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Spain's National Court on Thursday rejected a Syrian businessman's appeal against extradition to the United States where he is wanted on charges of plotting to supply weapons to Colombian rebels.

The court approved the extradition of Monzer al-Kassar in October but he appealed claiming the charges were of dubious legality, and the United States had racist and political motives in pursuing him.

Rejecting Al-Kassar's appeal, a panel of National Court judges said that he had been a known arms trafficker since the 1970s and had provided weapons to armed groups including Nicaragua, Brazil, Bosnia, Iran and Iraq.

"Some of these groups have been terrorist organizations ... whose aims have been to attack U.S properties and citizens," the panel ruled.

The final decision now lies with the Spanish governmentAccording to U.S. officials, undercover officers of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency arranged a fictitious deal with al-Kassar, convincing him they represented rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

They said they wanted to buy surface-to-air missile systems, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, thousands of machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition for the group to take down U.S. helicopters aiding Colombia's battle against drug traffickers.

The U.S. indictment charges al-Kassar with conspiring to support terrorists, conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers, conspiring to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles and money laundering.Al-Kassar, a longtime resident of Spain, stood trial in Spain in 1995 on charges of supplying assault rifles used by Palestinian militants in the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, in which one American was killed. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.

http://www.pr-inside.com/spain-s-national-court-rejects-appeal-by-r346931.htm

Time magazine and Coleman Rebuttal

Taken from the American Journalism Review, this article carries a firm rebuttal of the Time magazine article (Why Did They Die? (1992)) posted below, Juval Aviv who investigated on behalf of Pan Am and Lester Coleman the ex-DIA agent.

PanAm Scam

How two self-styled intelligence agents took the news media for a ride.
By Steven Emerson

Steven Emerson is a Washington, D.C. based reporter who writes frequently on U.S. intelligence and the Middle East. His most recent books are "Terrorist" and "The Fall of Pan Am 103."
Michael Schafer is a 39-year-old American who owns a floor cleaning company in Atlanta. In late April, he received a phone call notifying him that his photo was in the current issue of Time magazine. Schafer found a copy and began leafing through the cover story, "The Untold Story of Pan Am 103."

Near the bottom of page 31 was a passport-size photo. It was his picture. But the caption identified the person as "David Lovejoy, a reported double agent for the U.S. and Iran."
"I just couldn't believe what I was looking at," says Schafer. "There it was in front of millions and millions of people – Time magazine accusing me of being a terrorist!"

Time obviously screwed up. Publications, even ones as reputable as Time, make mistakes. But in this case, misidentifying Schafer was only one indication that something was amiss. More troubling was the article's reliance on self-described "intelligence operatives" who had already convinced a number of news organizations, including ABC, NBC and Barron's, as well as the now-defunct Pan American World Airways, that they knew the true story behind the December 1988 bombing.

Time not only ignored evidence that contradicted key elements of its story, but it also discounted information that disputed the credibility of its two main sources. The fact that both sources had a financial interest in the story should have made the magazine even more skeptical: They were paid consultants for Pan Am attorneys fighting a multimillion - dollar negligence claim by the victims' families, who alleged the airline's careless baggage handling allowed the tragedy to happen. If Time's sources were correct in their contention that U.S. undercover agents could have prevented the bombing, Pan Am probably would not be found liable.

The Time story and similar ones preceding it have been dismissed as baseless by U.S. and British officials who investigated the bombing. Nevertheless, Time editors insist their story is accurate. "We stand by this story as a good faith effort to explain the bombing," says John Stacks, Time's chief of correspondents. "This piece went through the same vetting procedure as all other articles."

The "Untold" Story

Time's April 27 cover story, written by veteran correspondent Roy Rowan, described a conspiracy involving U.S. agents of the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who allegedly collaborated, wittingly and unwittingly, in a Byzantine plot in which terrorists and drug traffickers bombed Pan Am 103 on December 22, 1988. It killed all 259 passengers and crew members as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, where the plane crashed.


The story, according to Rowan, goes like this:

• In the late 1980s the CIA operated a "freewheeling" unit in the Middle East, known as COREA, that trafficked in "drugs and arms in order to gain access to terrorist groups." The CIA and the DEA also was secretly cooperating with a Syrian drug trafficker and arms dealer named Monzer al-Kassar. In return for his help in obtaining the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, COREA allowed al-Kassar to ship drugs to the United States on U.S. airlines. Meanwhile, the DEA was using al-Kassar's drug-smuggling ring in a sting operation designed to flush out drug dealers in Detroit, Los Angeles and Houston – cities with large Arab populations.

• At about the same time, Syrian terrorist Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, was contracted by the Iranian government to avenge the downing of an Iranian Airbus by the U.S.S. Vincennes in July 1988. Jibril solicited and received al-Kassar's pledge to help by using his "CIA-assisted drug and arms business" to plant a bomb on an American plane. Al-Kassar was "reluctant" to get involved because he didn't want to disrupt his profitable smuggling operation, but he went along with the plan.

• Jibril had an additional motive for the bombing: He wanted to eliminate a U.S. "intelligence team" that was working on a plan to rescue American hostages in Beirut.
U.S. military intelligence official Charles "Tiny" McKee, who had been stationed in Beirut to collect information on the whereabouts of American hostages, learned of the CIA's secret COREA unit. McKee had complained to the CIA about COREA's ties to al-Kassar, but the agency had failed to respond. Furious at the agency's silence, McKee and four other U.S. intelligence operatives "decided to fly back to Virginia unannounced and expose the COREA unit's secret deal with al-Kassar."

Tehran found out about McKee's plans from an American double agent named David Lovejoy, "a one-time State Department security officer." Armed with this information, Jibril's group was able to target McKee and the other officials who had flown from Cyprus to London, where they changed planes, boarding Pan Am 103. To do this, the terrorists – with al-Kassar's assistance – switched a suitcase containing a bomb for a suitcase containing drugs and loaded it onto Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt. The plane picked up the McKee team and others in London.

• Al-Kassar wasn't involved in selecting the target or the date of the bombing. But after an Israeli agent warned German and U.S. intelligence agents about a terrorist attack on a U.S. airliner leaving Frankfurt "on or about December 18," al-Kassar – "playing both sides of the fence" – told COREA that Pan Am 103 was Jibril's "most likely target." The CIA could have foiled the plot, but, as one purported source charged, the agency "knew about it and screwed up."

The Mistold Story

In 1990 the independent President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism examined the same allegations – initially raised in 1989 – and found "no foundation for speculation in press accounts that U.S. government officials had participated tacitly or otherwise in any supposed operation at Frankurt Airport having anything to do with the sabotage of Flight 103." More recently, officials at the Justice Department, FBI and DEA have called the Time story – and the stories by ABC, NBC and others that preceded it – fabrications. And the findings of the U.S.-British Pan Am 103 investigation – the most comprehensive counterterrorist probe in history – completely contradict the Time cover story. The bombing inquiry included hundreds of investigators who spent three years on the case, conducting more than 14,000 interviews in 53 countries.

Initially the investigators concluded that Syria and Iran were responsible. But in the summer of 1990 the investigation took a dramatic turn, and in November 1991 the U.S. Justice Department obtained the indictments of two Libyan intelligence agents, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, on charges they conspired to bomb the plane.

According to the indictments and other government and airline records, a remnant from a microchip in the bomb's timer identified in mid-1990 showed that the timer was one of many acquired by Libyan intelligence operatives and that the suitcase containing the bomb was loaded onto an Air Malta flight and transferred twice : at Frankfurt Airport onto a Boeing 727 with the Pan Am 103 flight number, and again onto a Boeing 747, also called Pan Am 103, at London's Heathrow Airport. According to U.S. officials, the evidence was further buttressed by a Libyan government agent who defected to the United States last year.

The indictments generated some controversy, leading several critics to charge that the U.S. government might be engaged in a cover-up. Some victims' families alleged that the indictments of the Libyans – and the fact that no Syrians were named – were a reward for Syria's involvement in the Desert Storm campaign and an attempt to persuade Syria to help win the release of American hostages. President Bush rushed to claim that the indictments exonerated Syria. "Syria took a bum rap on this," he told reporters.

Time exploited this controversy to advance a radically different explanation for the bombing, one that was being promoted by, among others, an ex-Israeli named Juval Aviv.
In fact, Time's investigation appears to be drawn largely from a report assembled by Aviv, now a U.S. citizen. Aviv is president of Interfor, a New York-based international security firm hired by Pan Am's attorneys in June 1989 to build a case to defend the airline from negligence charges.

Less than three months after Pan Am hired Aviv, he "solved" the mystery of who carried out the bombing. Claiming to have collected information from his own sources – none of whom he would identify – Aviv assembled a 26-page report and later made it available to the press. Two-and-a-half-years later he would give a longer version to Time. A line-by-line reading of Rowan's article and the updated Aviv report shows that Rowan repeated many of its most controversial allegations.

When carefully scrutinized, Aviv's report turns out to be a mixture of unsubstantiated declarations, previously reported arcane facts, and widely known information (such as the fact that passenger Khalid Jaffar initially was considered a suspect in carrying the bomb aboard the plane in Frankfurt) – all woven together in a tapestry of demonstrably false and largely uncorroborated theory. Aviv even asserts that German intelligence agents gave the CIA a videotape of the bomb being put aboard the plane. He claimed to have seen the video and promised reporters he would obtain a copy – a promise he has never kept.

Equally problematic is Aviv's background, which is decidedly different than what he told Pan Am and the press. Aviv says he worked for the Mossad, Israel's secret service. He also has claimed that he was personally responsible for tracking down and killing the Palestinian terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Rowan acknowledges that "Israeli and U.S. intelligence sources deny Aviv was ever associated with Mossad," but does not challenge further Aviv's background and repeats Aviv's claim that he was a Mossad agent.
Staff members of the the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism checked Aviv's background and concluded that he had "fabricated" his credentials.

The commission also had received a May 1990 report from Yigal Carmon, Israel's top counterterrorism official, which states that Aviv "never worked for the intelligence community of the State of Israel" and that the only connection he had to security work was a job he held as a "junior security officer" for the Israeli airline El Al. He was fired in April 1974 after less than 18 months work for being "unreliable and dishonest." Aviv, the report further notes, "has been involved during the years (after being dismissed from El-Al) in various acts of fraud and impersonation."

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's Pan Am 103 investigation, says Aviv was never in Israeli intelligence and that "none of his allegations have any basis in fact. He's a fabricator and a scam artist." Aviv refused to be interviewed for this article.


The Observer Weighs In

Because his report lacked substantiation, Aviv might have been ignored by the media except for one development: Once Pan Am received his report in October 1989, its lawyers issued subpoenas to the CIA, DEA, FBI and other government agencies. The detailed descriptions in the subpoenas reiterated Aviv's claims.

To some journalists, the fact that Pan Am had issued subpoenas seemed to legitimize the charges. Within weeks, the combination of the subpoenas and the "leak" of Aviv's report resulted in a spate of headlines in Britain and the United States.

In response, the U.S. Senate and House intelligence committees asked for briefings from the CIA, FBI and Pentagon about Aviv's charges. In a series of classified briefings in November and December 1989, CIA and FBI officials told the committees there was no substance to the allegations.

The first journalists to report critically on the Aviv report were John Merritt and Simon de Bruxelles of the London-based Observer. In November 1989, Merritt began to scrutinize the few allegations that were subject to independent verification.

Merritt and de Bruxelles went over the report with painstaking detail. For example, Aviv had alleged that terrorist-drug trafficker al-Kassar had rented a car from a Paris car rental agency on November 25, 1988, and driven it to Frankfurt and back. But Merritt obtained the rental agency's records and found that no car rented at that time logged enough miles to cover such a trip.

The Observer reporters also found that COREA – which Aviv (and later ABC, NBC and Time) claimed was a CIA unit or operation – was in fact the "designated code word for communications [among an official] group of police, customs, and intelligence services cooperating in Europe" on terrorism and violence. The group, TREVI, has an office in Brussels. Despite Merritt's findings, Aviv's misrepresentation of COREA as a renegade intelligence unit would be repeated by the media for the next two-and-a-half years.

Merritt also found that Aviv's report contained passages about European law enforcement surveillance of al-Kassar that were similar to those in an obscure 1984 German nonfiction book ("Der Pate Der Terroriste" by Manfred Mohrstein) that has never been translated into English.
"Aviv had pieced together known events and facts together in a wild conspiracy," Merritt says. "He's never been in the Mossad."

The Retold Story

The Aviv conspiracy story died down until late October 1990, when a slightly newer version was broadcast as the lead news item on NBC and ABC evening and morning news shows. Instead of blaming the CIA for allowing the tragedy to happen, the two networks shifted the spotlight to the DEA.

NBC's Brian Ross reported that terrorists may have infiltrated a DEA undercover drug sting in which a 20-year-old passenger with dual Lebanese-U.S. citizenship, Khalid Jaffar, had been working as an informant and courier for U.S. agents. NBC reported that terrorists had secretly switched a suitcase containing a bomb for Jaffar's suitcase, which contained heroin. NBC said the name of the DEA Beirut-Cyprus-Frankfurt-Detroit drug operation was "Courier." ABC's Pierre Salinger reported the same allegation, but said the DEA drug operation was called "Corea" and was discontinued two months before the bombing. Salinger also suggested the DEA was involved in a cover-up. Despite competitive pressures, CBS refused to air the story.

Ira Silverman, Ross' producer at NBC, says the network's story was triggered by the fact that DEA was "calling in their own people – sources and subsources – to determine for themselves whether DEA operations were connected to the bombing." He says that he and Ross were concerned that DEA may have lost control of some of its informants, who may have been providing terrorists information about DEA sting operations.

Salinger says he stands by his story. "The fact that there was a drug operation in Frankfurt and in Cyprus was verified and the fact that the drug operation was called off a month before the Pan Am 103 bombing also has been verified," he says. However, Salinger acknowledges, "There is no proof of the connection between the drug operation and the bombing."

Besieged by inquiries from the press and Congress – which announced it would hold hearings – the DEA accelerated its investigation. Within a week the agency reviewed every file from the previous five years and sent inquiries to its agents overseas. The evidence collected by the DEA – and independently confirmed by the FBI – showed that the allegations reported by NBC and ABC were baseless.

The DEA produced a 350-page classified report in November 1990, released information to reporters, and then sent agency officials to testify in open congressional hearings in mid-December. According to the agency, there was no DEA operation or unit named "Corea," "Courier" or anything similar to that name. Passenger Jaffar had never been used as an informant or subsource, and no DEA office or agent ever had any contact with him. According to FBI and Scotland Yard forensic analyses, Jaffar's two pieces of luggage showed no signs of explosives or drugs – a conclusion publicly confirmed by Scotland's Fatal Accident Inquiry Board. (If one of Jaffar's bags had been "switched" after checking in, then that bag would have remained in Frankfurt. But both of his bags were accounted for.) Finally, there had been no "controlled deliveries" of drugs or sting operations through Cyprus or Frankfurt since 1987. There had been three controlled deliveries through Frankfurt between 1983 and 1987, but none involved Pan Am planes.

Still, some journalists were not convinced. In its December 17, 1990 issue, Barron's published a lengthy article reporting virtually everything in the Aviv report. The conspiracy theory would not die.

A New Source

The reports by NBC and ABC were also based on information from a new player in the conspiracy story: Lester Coleman. Coleman, who said he was a top operative for both the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an arm of the Pentagon, and the DEA in the Middle East, had been hired by Pan Am in mid-1990 to assist in the Pan Am 103 investigation.
To journalists and Pan Am attorneys, Coleman was a dream come true. He said he was willing to talk about everything he knew – including a purported DEA sting operation that he believed led to the bombing of Pan Am 103. Coleman alleged that passenger Jaffar was one of his "informants" who served as a U.S. courier from Lebanon via the Frankfurt Airport as part of a DEA-sanctioned sting operation.


Conspiracy supporters claimed that Coleman's allegations independently corroborated Aviv's story. But, in fact, Coleman had teamed up with Aviv earlier in 1990 after reading about Aviv's investigation. An internal November 1990 DEA memo reported that Aviv told a DEA agent that Coleman had contacted him several months before and that "Coleman was approaching different people offering to sell information about the Pan Am 103 bombing." Journalists who were in regular contact with Coleman also confirmed that he collaborated with Aviv. By the time NBC and ABC interviewed Coleman, he had worked out his story with Aviv.


Coleman also was a principal source for Time's cover story a year-and-a-half later. Rowan reported Coleman's allegations as facts, repeating his description of himself as a top DIA agent working undercover for the DEA in Cyprus and intimately involved in covert "controlled drug operations" for the U.S. government. Calling Coleman Pan Am's "key witness," Rowan wrote that Coleman "spotted a newspaper picture of one of the Pan Am victims" and recognized him as one of his "drug-running informants" from Lebanon – Khalid Jaffar. Coleman, said Rowan, then contacted Pan Am.


Rowan quoted a source who suggested that Coleman was arrested in May 1990 in the United States on "trumped-up charges" in order to keep him quiet. Coleman, Rowan wrote, is now "hiding in fear of his life in a small town in Europe." In fact, Coleman fled the United States rather than stand trial after his arrest for passport fraud.


The charge of passport fraud is a minor indication that Coleman may not be completely honest. DEA documents, court records and interviews with journalists and government officials show him to be someone who operated at the periphery of U.S. government agencies but repeatedly exaggerated his work and involvement in anti-terrorist and anti-drug operations.


Rather than serving as an agent, DEA files state that Coleman was a freelance journalist in the Middle East who also worked as a U.S. informant. Coleman is married to a Lebanese woman, and therefore has an identity card that allowed him to move freely in and out of Lebanon.


An internal DEA memo states the agency hired Coleman on January 31, 1986 as a "confidential informant" in Cyprus for a 10-month period and again between February 1987 and June 1988. He was hired, according to the memo, after he "offered to video record the opium/cannabis production in Lebanon." But in June 1988, Coleman was "deactivated" by the DEA for "unsatisfactory behavior," which included selling DEA information illegally to Soldier of Fortune magazine and "obtaining goods and services" on Cyprus under "false pretenses." Coleman's file at DEA states that he had been "caught up in a quagmire of fabrications with DEA, the Cyprus Police Force and his] subsources and other associates in Cyprus."


To bolster Coleman's credibility, Rowan reported that Micheal Hurley, DEA's country attaché in Cyprus, "admitted in a Justice Department affidavit that he had paid Coleman $74,000 for information." But Rowan omitted nearly everything else in Hurley's detailed nine-page affidavit. Hurley stated flatly that there was no substance to Coleman's assertions and that Coleman had misrepresented his activities, bounced checks to subsources, and had been banned from Cyprus for failing to pay his bills.


Furthermore, Rowan didn't contact Hurley. Had he done so, Hurley says he would have provided him with a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone call between Coleman and a friend in which Coleman admitted that he never met Pan Am 103 passenger Jaffar – whom Coleman had identified as "one of his drug-running informants" to Time, NBC and ABC.


Besides U.S. government agencies, several journalists also have discovered Coleman has credibility problems. For example, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Ron Martz and Lloyd M. Burchette Jr. went to Cyprus in 1988 to do research for a story on drug trafficking and terrorism. They hired Coleman as a consultant.


"Les promised to provide us access to all sorts of people and it's clear that he had greatly exaggerated his contacts," Martz says. "We soon found out what the Cypriot police already knew: He was a wannabe, scurrying around on the fringes... He was a great fabricator; he had a great ability to spin a yarn. I'm embarrassed to say that he even convinced me."


Burchette, now a screenwriter, recalls that Coleman continuously ran up hotel and telephone bills without delivering on any of his promises. "We were suckered," he says. "Coleman was a first-rate liar."


Following his arrest for passport fraud in May 1990, Coleman unsuccessfully tried to get DEA officials to quash the case against him. Embittered both by his termination from DEA and by the agency's refusal to protect him, Coleman apparently sought revenge, in particular against DEA agent Hurley, who had fired him. Revenge – in the form of the phony Pan Am story – would prove to be financially rewarding as well.


In a telephone conversation with Burchette in November 1990, Coleman said that he had provided information to ABC and NBC and that Pan Am was paying him for his information. "Coleman was snickering that he had pulled the wool over the networks' eyes," Burchette recalls. "He even admitted to me that he didn't know who Khalid Jaffar was." Coleman had just told ABC and NBC – and they reported – that Jaffar was a drug courier for the DEA.
The two networks were the first of many media outlets to be misled by Coleman over the next year. For example, in the Sunday (London) Times on July 22, 1991, Coleman's assertions – ranging from his claims about being an intelligence agent to his allegations about a drug sting aboard Pan Am 103 – were again reported uncritically.


The payoff for Coleman, who along with Aviv was working for Pan Am, has been significant. The two men have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Pan Am's attorneys, according to officials close to the case. Pan Am's law firm, Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives, would not comment.
Having conned journalists about their inside knowledge of the bombing of Pan Am 103, Aviv and Coleman began plugging into other conspiracies fanned by various American reporters. INSLAW, a small company that alleges the Justice Department stole computer software from it, retained Aviv as an investigator. Prominent television shows such as "Nightline" and "60 Minutes" also have used Aviv as a consultant. Meanwhile, Coleman provided INSLAW with an affidavit claiming he has evidence linking the DEA, the Iran-contra scandal, the BCCI scandal and the INSLAW affair.


Like Aviv, Coleman refused to be interviewed for this article.

More Problems


Aside from its acceptance of Aviv and Coleman's allegations, Rowan's story had a number of other half-truths, misstatements and omissions. Among them:


• Rowan reported that in January 1990, Aviv, a Pan Am attorney and a "polygraph specialist" administered lie detector tests to two Frankfurt Airport Pan Am baggage handlers suspected of allowing the bomb on board. Rowan reported that both men had flunked their tests and that the polygraph specialist said one was "not truthful" when he denied that he switched suitcases.
Rowan neglected to point out that all of the court rulings in the Pan Am 103 case, in addition to FBI and Scotland Yard investigators, have dismissed as totally baseless allegations that the baggage handlers had anything to do with the bombing.


• Rowan also reported that the terrorists got the bomb aboard Pan Am 103 because they knew in advance which flight the targeted intelligence agents would be taking. In fact, at least three of the agents made their travel arrangements within 48 hours of the flight. Moreover, the agents flew from Cyprus to London. Rowan never explained how or why terrorists would place a bomb on a plane in Frankfurt in order to target agents travelling on a different route. Moreover, Rowan failed to report that the first leg of Pan Am 103's flight from Frankfurt to London was on a Boeing 727. In London, 49 out of the 125 passengers transferred to a Boeing 747 – also called Pan Am 103 – bound for New York. It was the second plane that blew up over Lockerbie.
U.S. and British investigators concluded that the fact that McKee and four other U.S. intelligence agents were aboard Pan Am 103 was a tragic coincidence.


• Time did not reveal a potential conflict of interest. Aviv, a key source for Time's Pan Am story, had been working on a project with Rowan for Time's sister company, Warner Books. The publishing company had paid "seed money" to Rowan and Aviv to explore the possibility of the two collaborating on a book about Aviv's life, according to Rowan and Nancy Neiman, a Warner Books executive vice president. Rowan says he could not substantiate enough of Aviv's biography to warrant the project, so he returned the unused portion of the money he had received. Aviv, however, did not return his unused portion, according to sources at Time. Neiman would not comment.


Time Chief of Correspondents Stacks said the Warner deal was completely separate from Time. "Time did not pay Aviv anything," he said. "This wasn't checkbook journalism."

The Lawsuit


The civil lawsuit pitting the victims' families against Pan Am's insurers was scheduled to begin last spring. The Aviv-Coleman conspiracy theory – essentially Pan Am's defense – would be put to the test. The stakes were enormous: If the jury found that the airline's security program had been negligent, Pan Am's insurers would be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. Pan Am itself had gone bankrupt in January 1991 and went out of business last December.
The Time cover story appeared a week before the opening of the trial on April 27. Much of Rowan's story was taken from court records and exhibits filed by Pan Am's attorneys before the trial, which included material supporting the Aviv-Coleman allegations. But Pan Am's attorneys never introduced their "key witness" Coleman, Aviv, or the allegation that terrorists infiltrating a CIA-DEA drug sting.


According to sources familiar with the defense strategy, Pan Am's attorneys began having doubts about Aviv and Coleman two years ago. Even so, they went along with the conspiracy story because it was their only hope of winning the case. But when the defense attorneys apparently realized that their prize witnesses and their story would be torn to shreds under cross examination, they withdrew the witnesses. Even so, the Aviv-Coleman story showed up on the cover of Time just one week before the trial.


Rowan's story was not the first time allegations similar to those outlined in the Aviv report surfaced just before judicial proceedings on the bombing. As David Leppard, author of "On the Trail of Terror," a book on the bombing, pointed out in an article he wrote for the Washington Post in late April, Time's "untold story of Pan Am 103" "appeared twice before under similar circumstances... In autumn 1989, in the midst of evidence-taking in Frankfurt that proved highly critical of Pan Am, the story surfaced in the British and U.S. media. A year later, on the eve of the 1990 inquiry in Scotland, an identical item was reported on NBC-TV."


Two days after the Time story appeared, attorneys for the victims' families, in a letter to the court, charged that Pan Am's attorneys were trying to sow confusion in an effort to influence the 550-member jury pool. In the letter, lead attorney Lee Kreindler stated that "false information..appears to have been given to Time by the defendants."


Nevertheless, the strategy didn't work. On July 11, a jury found Pan Am liable for "willful misconduct" in its sloppy baggage handling that allowed the bomb on Pan Am 103.

False Accusation


Time's Rowan stands by his story. He says he independently confirmed the substance of his article and cites the fact that other "stories had also reported these things."
He says Aviv and Coleman correctly identified COREA as a secret CIA unit dealing with drugs and weapons. "I buy the notion that COREA was a rogue unit," he says. "I have talked to another intelligence agent. But I can't tell you his name."


As for the other allegations in his article, Rowan says, "I only used from Aviv what I could corroborate from another source. There were a lot of things in his report that I could not substantiate and I did not report them. In the case of Coleman, I used things for which I had documentation either from him or from other sources. A lot of people in the government would like to discredit Coleman. I haven't found anything that he told me that was proven wrong.
"We made one mistake in identifying [Schafer as] Lovejoy," he acknowledges, "but that wasn't Coleman's error."


Michael Schafer and his attorney complained to Time about the false accusation. Time acknowledged in a one-paragraph "correction" four weeks after the Pan Am story was published that the photo was actually that of Schafer and stated it "regrets that Schafer's photograph was used in error." Time said that the photo was "identified in court documents as being of David Lovejoy, a reported double agent for the U.S. and Iran." But how did the photo get into the court records?


Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Burchette believes the picture was given to Pan Am by Coleman, who had worked with Schafer when the latter was a cameraman for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Lebanon in 1985. Burchette recalls that one day in May 1988 in Cyprus, Coleman showed him a letter of identification stating that Michael Schafer "is a representative of CBN News assigned to the Beirut bureau." It included a photo of Schafer – the same photo Time said was "David Lovejoy" – and was signed by Coleman, who was a CBN senior correspondent at the time. A copy of this letter of identification shows that the photo of Schafer and that of "Lovejoy" are exactly the same.


"Coleman never thought the picture would ever end up in Time," says Burchette. "He just thought that Pan Am would buy it and that would be it."

Inconvenient Truths by Hugh Miles

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was 38 minutes into its journey when it was blown up at 31,000 feet. The explosion was so powerful that the nose of the aircraft was torn clean off. Within three seconds of the bomb detonating, the cockpit, fuselage and No. 3 engine were falling separately out of the sky. It happened so quickly that no distress call was sent out and no oxygen masks deployed. With the cockpit gone, the fuselage depressurised instantly and the passengers in the rear section of the aircraft found themselves staring out into the Scottish night air. Anyone or anything not strapped down was whipped out of the plane; the change in air pressure made the passengers’ lungs expand to four times their normal volume and everyone lost consciousness. As the fuselage plummeted and the air pressure began to return to normal, some passengers came round, including the captain. A few survived all the way down, until they hit the ground. Rescuers found them clutching crucifixes, or holding hands, still strapped into their seats.

The fuselage of the plane landed on a row of family houses in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. The impact was so powerful that the British Geological Survey registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale. The wing section of the Boeing 747, loaded with enough fuel for a transatlantic flight, hit the ground at more than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth.

Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground had been killed. Bodies and debris were strewn along an 81-mile corridor of Scottish countryside. Ten thousand pieces of debris were retrieved; each was meticulously logged. Among the items recovered were the remains of a Samsonite suitcase, which investigators later established had been used to transport the bomb. The suitcase had contained clothes, clothes that were subsequently traced to the shop of a Maltese man called Tony Gauci. Gauci later became a key prosecution witness. Fragments of a circuit board and a Toshiba radio were also recovered and identified as parts of the bomb.

Twelve years later, on 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges convicted a former Libyan intelligence officer for mass murder at Lockerbie. Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was tried at a specially convened court on a former US air force base near the Dutch town of Zeist. Under a special international arrangement, the court, which sat without a jury, was temporarily declared sovereign territory of the United Kingdom, under the jurisdiction of Scottish law.

Megrahi is still the only person to have been found guilty in connection with the attack. He was sentenced to 27 years in jail. His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, a fellow Libyan intelligence officer, was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was initially told that he would spend at least twenty years in prison, but the Crown, which was prosecuting, protested that this sentence was unduly lenient and petitioned the judges for a longer one. In 2003 the judges reconvened to rule that he must serve no less than 27 years before the parole board would consider his eligibility for release. Al-Megrahi’s defence team had already lodged an appeal against the conviction, but in March 2002 the guilty verdict was upheld.

From the outset the Lockerbie disaster has been marked by superlatives. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack on American civilians until 11 September 2001. It sparked Britain’s biggest ever criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet.

Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. Robert Black QC, an emeritus professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, was one of the architects of the original trial in Holland. He has closely followed developments since the disaster happened and in 2000 devised the non-jury trial system for the al-Megrahi case.

Even before the trial he was so sure the evidence against al-Megrahi would not stand up in court that he is on record as saying that a conviction would be impossible. When I asked how he feels about this remark now, Black replied: ‘I am still absolutely convinced that I am right. No reasonable tribunal, on the evidence heard at the original trial, should or could have convicted him and it is an absolute disgrace and outrage what the Scottish court did.’

Al-Megrahi lost his appeal in 2002, but under Scottish law he is entitled to a further legal review, to be conducted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), an independent public body made up of senior police officers and lawyers. Its job is to re-examine cases where a miscarriage of justice may have occurred: it handles cases after the appeal process has been exhausted, and if it finds evidence that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place it refers the case to the High Court to be heard again. Al-Megrahi applied to the SCCRC for a review of his case in 2003 and the commission has been reinspecting evidence from the trial for the last four years. It will submit its findings at the end of June. It looks likely that the SCCRC will find that there is enough evidence to refer al-Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. The Crown Office has already begun reinforcing its Lockerbie legal team in anticipation of a referral.

If al-Megrahi is granted a second appeal, it will, like the original trial, be held before a panel of Scottish judges, without a jury. This time the trial will take place in Scotland, and if the glacial pace of proceedings in the past is anything to go by, it will probably not be heard before the summer of 2008. Al-Megrahi’s defence team would be ready to launch an appeal in a matter of weeks, but the prosecution would be likely to delay the hearing for as long as possible. If an appeal takes place, al-Megrahi’s defence team will produce important evidence that was not available at the time of the first appeal, evidence that seems likely not only to exonerate al-Megrahi but to do so by pointing the finger of blame at the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and revealing some inconvenient truths.

Even the judge who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.’ Lord Fraser made it clear that this did not mean he thought al-Megrahi was innocent. But he had presented Gauci as a reliable witness; he went on to become the heart of the prosecution’s case. Now he was casting doubt on the man who identified al-Megrahi.

Since al-Megrahi’s last appeal, many thousands of pages of reports, detailing freight and baggage movements in and out of Frankfurt airport, have been handed over to the defence. Largely in German and many handwritten, the papers were translated by the Crown at the taxpayer’s expense, but the Crown refused to share the translations with the defence and left it no time to commission its own. The Privy Council’s judicial committee, made up of law lords and senior judges, has declared that the Crown’s refusal to disclose this evidence is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. More damaging still, an unnamed senior British police officer – known to be a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS), which implies that his rank is assistant chief constable or higher – has testfied to al-Megrahi’s defence team that crucial evidence at the trial was fabricated. If the SCCRC finds that the prosecution played foul, the Crown may decide it would be better not to continue with its case, allowing al-Megrahi to be freed immediately.

This anonymous senior officer’s testimony chimes with the well-trodden theory that the American government had a hand in fixing the trial. Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ‘totally incomprehensible’.

In his report Köchler wrote that he found the presence of US Justice Department representatives in the court ‘highly problematic’, because it gave the impression that they were ‘“supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding . . . which documents . . . were to be released in open court and what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld.’ ‘The alternative theory of the defence,’ he went on, ‘was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and national security considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued – although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defence case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer.’ The prosecution, Köchler noted, dismissed evidence on the grounds that it was not relevant; but now that that evidence has finally – partially – been released, it turns out to be very relevant indeed: to the defence.

Whatever happens, al-Megrahi may not have to wait long. As soon as a further appeal is scheduled, he can make an application to be released from custody: the convicted Lockerbie bomber, who was supposed to serve no fewer than 27 years in a Scottish jail, might well be free this summer. Whether al-Megrahi is freed pending his appeal – and what conditions would be applied if he were – depends largely on whether his defence team can convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. This may be hard to do. The judge might decide that if he left the country, he might choose to stay in Libya rather than come back next year for another round in court. If al-Megrahi is exonerated, many tricky questions will resurface, not least what to do about the $2.7 billion compensation paid by Libya to the relatives of the victims of the bombing. And then, of course, there is the question of who really bombed Flight 103.

In the first three years following the bombing, before a shred of evidence had been produced to incriminate Libya, the Dumfries and Galloway police, the FBI and several other intelligence services around the world all shared the belief that the Lockerbie bombers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Palestinian rejectionist organisation backed by Iran. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain; its headquarters are in Damascus and it is closely allied with the Syrian president and other senior Syrian officials. In the 1970s and 1980s the PFLP-GC carried out a number of raids against Israel, including a novel hang-glider assault launched from inside Lebanon. Lawyers, intelligence services and diplomats around the world continue to suspect that Jibril – who has even boasted that he is responsible – was behind Lockerbie.

The case against Jibril and his gang is well established. It runs like this: in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus, apparently mistaking it for an attacker. On board Iran Air Flight 655 were 270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran. The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing.

We know at least that two months before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany. On 26 October 1998, German police arrested 17 terrorist suspects who, surveillance showed, had cased Frankfurt airport and browsed Pan Am flight timetables. Four Semtex-based explosive devices were confiscated; a fifth is known to have gone missing. They were concealed inside Toshiba radios very similar to the one found at Lockerbie a few weeks later. One of the gang, a Palestinian known as Abu Talb, was later found to have a calendar in his flat in Sweden with the date of 21 December circled. New evidence, now in the hands of al-Megrahi’s defence, proves for the first time that Abu Talb was in Malta when the Lockerbie bombing took place. The Maltese man whose testimony convicted al-Megrahi has also identified Abu Talb. During al-Megrahi’s trial Abu Talb had a strange role. As part of a defence available in Scottish law, known as ‘incrimination’, Abu Talb was named as someone who – rather than the accused – might have carried out the bombing. At the time he was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the bombing of a synagogue, but he was summoned to Camp Zeist to give evidence. He ended up testifying as a prosecution witness, denying that he had anything to do with Lockerbie. In exchange for his testimony, he received lifelong immunity from prosecution.
Other evidence has emerged showing that the bomb could have been placed on the plane at Frankfurt airport, a possibility that the prosecution in al-Megrahi’s trial consistently ruled out (their case depended on the suitcase containing the bomb having been transferred from a connecting flight from Malta). Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.
The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. Syria subsequently joined the UN forces. Quietly, the evidence incriminating Jibril, so painstakingly sifted from the debris, was binned.
Those who continued to press the case against the PFLP-GC seemed to fall foul of American law. When a New York corporate investigative company asked to look into the bombing on behalf of Pan Am found the PFLP-GC responsible, the federal government promptly indicted the company’s president, Juval Aviv, for mail fraud. Lester Coleman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency operative who was researching a book about the PFLP-GC and Lockerbie, was charged by the FBI with ‘falsely procuring a passport’. William Casey, a lobbyist who made similar allegations in 1995, found his bank accounts frozen and federal agents searching through his trash. Even so, documents leaked from the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995, two years after the Libyans were first identified as the prime suspects, still blamed the PFLP-GC.
Suspicions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Lockerbie from the beginning. Some of them are fairly outlandish. In Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005), Brigid Keenan, the wife of the British diplomat Alan Waddams, reported that over dinner in Gambia, a former Interpol agent told her and her husband that the bombing had been a revenge attack by Iran, in retaliation for the downed airliner (though she didn’t say how he knew this). The Interpol agent claimed the cargo had not been checked because the plane was carrying drugs as part of a deal over American hostages held by Hizbullah in Beirut. Militant groups were being allowed to smuggle heroin into the US in exchange for information; the bomb had gone on board when the PFLP-GC found a loophole in this drug-running operation.
At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again.

In December 1998, Susan Lindauer, a US congressional aide, submitted a sworn deposition to the court in which she claimed that Richard Fuisz, a CIA agent, had given her a guarantee that he knew who was behind the Lockerbie bombing. Lindauer’s affidavit describes a conversation in Fuisz’s ‘business office’ in Chantilly, Virginia, in which he said he knew for sure the perpetrators were based in Syria. ‘Dr Fuisz has told me that he can identify who orchestrated and executed the bombing. Dr Fuisz has said that he can confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of Pan Am 103, either in any technical or advisory capacity whatsoever.’ ‘If the government would let me, I could identify the men behind this attack,’ Lindauer says Fuisz told her.

Lindauer has since been accused by the US government of being an Iraqi agent; her case is pending. But her earlier deposition has been submitted to the SCCRC. It can’t count for much, however, since Fuisz himself is not able to comment. In October 1994, a month after Lindauer spoke to him, Fuisz was gagged by a Washington court. The US government ruled that under state secrecy laws he faced ten years in prison if he spoke about the Lockerbie bombing. UN observers have since criticised this apparent restraint of a key witness.

When Libya handed al-Megrahi over for trial, sanctions on Libya authorised by the Security Council were suspended and diplomatic relations with Britain restored. Tony Blair claims the Libyan detente was one of his most important foreign policy victories, and last month, as the long shadow began to fall across his premiership, Blair swung by Tripoli to meet again with Libya’s leader. Gaddafi has always contested that al-Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber and that he should be allowed to return home. Maybe the two leaders touched on the prickly topic of what should be done about the compensation paid by Libya, in the event al-Megrahi is exonerated.

When al-Megrahi was handed over for trial, Libya declared that it would accept responsibility for his actions. But it never accepted guilt. This distinction was spelled out clearly in Libyan letters to the UN Security Council. In a BBC radio interview in 2004, the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, underlined once again that compensation had been paid because this was the ‘price for peace’ and to secure the lifting of sanctions. When asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said: ‘I agree with that.’

If the court that convicted al-Megrahi now reverses its decision, then Libya would clearly have a case for demanding its money back. Since recovering the compensation from the relatives would be unthinkable, it is more likely Libya would pursue those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. ‘What they might try to do,’ Black suggests, ‘is to recoup the money from the British and American governments, who after all are responsible for the initial farce and the wrongful conviction in the first place. They paid that money on the basis of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the British courts.’ Al-Megrahi’s acquittal on appeal would not ipso facto make a compelling case for Libya to have its money back: even if guilt can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt – the test of the criminal burden of proof – it could still be shown that it was more likely than not (which is the burden applied to civil cases such as compensation cases).

If Libya paid the money for purely political reasons then, one could argue, it might have to live with that decision. When I asked the Foreign Office whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of al-Megrahi’s exoneration, a spokesman declined to comment.

If al-Megrahi is acquitted, he will also have the right to sue for wrongful conviction. He could claim compensation to the tune of several tens of thousands of pounds. The Crown Office, which is headed by the Scottish lord advocate, is responsible for what happened, which means that al-Megrahi would sue the Scottish Executive. The lord advocate is now one of the ‘Scottish ministers’, whereas previously he – now she – was one of the law officers of the UK Government. The Scottish Executive might refuse to pay, blaming Westminster. Westminster, meanwhile, would argue that Lockerbie is and always has been a Crown Office matter and that the UK government has no say. A political storm is on its way, especially now that the SNP is in charge in Scotland.

Since the case against al-Megrahi was so weak, it is hard to understand how the judges who presided over the trial could have got it so wrong. Black has a view:
It has been suggested to me, very often by Libyans, that political pressure was placed upon the judges. I don’t think for a minute that political pressure of that nature was placed on the judges. What happened, I think, was that it was internal politics in Scotland. Prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the lord advocate. Until just a few years ago, one of the other functions of the lord advocate in Scotland was that he appointed all Scottish judges. I think what influenced these judges was that they thought that if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the lord advocate.

The appointment system for judges has changed since the trial, but another controversial aspect of the al-Megrahi case may also be re-examined: the policies on disclosure. Compared to almost any other similar criminal justice system, Scotland does not have a proper system of disclosure of information. In England and Wales, the Crown has to disclose all material to the defence, according to rules set out in statute. In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the ‘public interest’. At least the Scottish criminal justice system doesn’t have the death penalty.

Hugh Miles has lived in Libya, Egypt and Yemen. He works in London.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/mile01_.html