Marcllo Mega / The Scotsman – 2006-05-12 23:26:11
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1855852005
SCOTLAND (May 10, 2006) — A former Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.
The retired officer — of assistant chief constable rank or higher — has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.
The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.
The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi’s attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses “wrote the script” to incriminate Libya.
Last night, George Esson, who was Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway when Megrahi was indicted for mass murder, confirmed he was aware of the development.
But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer’s motives. He said: “Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I can’t help but question their motive for raising the matter now.”
Other important questions remain unanswered, such as how the officer learned of the alleged conspiracy and whether he was directly involved in the inquiry. But sources close to Megrahi’s legal team believe they may have finally discovered the evidence that could demolish the case against him.
An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer approached them after Megrahi’s appeal — before a bench of five Scottish judges — was dismissed in 2002.
The insider said: “He said he believed he had crucial information. A meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been planted by US agents.”
Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he’d been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified. “He also said that at the time he became aware of the matter, no one really believed there would ever be a trial. When it did come about, he believed both accused would be acquitted. When Megrahi was convicted, he told himself he’d be cleared at appeal.” The source added: “When that also failed, he explained he felt he had to come forward.
“He has confirmed that parts of the case were fabricated and that evidence was planted. At first he requested anonymity, but has backed down and will be identified if and when the case returns to the appeal court.”
The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.
The fragment was later identified by the FBI’s Thomas Thurman as being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives, and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to Libya and the East German Stasi.
At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm’s headquarters.
The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya — and Megrahi — to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of scientific qualifications.
Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi’s lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.
The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a wild conspiracy theory. It has long been rumoured the fragment was planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.
The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.
Following the trial, legal observers from around the world, including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland. Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.
A source close to Megrahi’s defence said: “Britain and the US were telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.
“The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a manufactured case, mistakes were made.”
Dr Jim Swire, who has publicly expressed his belief in Megrahi’s innocence, said it was quite right that all relevant information now be put to the SCCRC.
Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity, said last night: “I am aware that there have been doubts about how some of the evidence in the case came to be presented in court. It is in all our interests that areas of doubt are thoroughly examined.”
A spokeswoman for the Crown Office said: “As this case is currently being examined by the SCCRC, it would be inappropriate to comment.”
No one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland was available to comment.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
The Pan Am 103 and 9/11 Connection
Russell Pickering / Pentagon Reseach.com
In the recent Rense-linked article “Police Chief – Lockerbie Evidence was Faked,” there is a huge clue as to what may have happened to 9/11 evidence as well (1). The key lies in the fact that the exact same person “handled” both investigations.
In fact, the person who led the Pan Am 103 investigation for Bush Sr.’s “Justice” Department just happened to be appointed the director of the FBI by Bush Jr. just seven days prior to 9/11.
“Robert Mueller was nominated by President George W. Bush and became the sixth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on September 4, 2001”. (2)
“After spending 1988 and 1989 in private practice, he joined the staff of Attorney-General Richard Thornburgh, and his star rose at the Justice Department as the head of the criminal division under President George Bush’s father from 1990 to 1993.
And he led the investigations of the 1991 collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International banking and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103.” (3)
Here is a link about Pan Am 103 — note the part about the Intelligence Officers on board.
I tried to find out more at the George Bush Sr. Presidential Library since Pan Am sued the US government and, “In its suit, Pan Am alleged that the United States Government had prior knowledge of an impending terrorist attack on a Pan Am airliner”.
But as luck would have it the, “…..court transcripts, affidavits, depositions, motions, objections, reports, and news clippings…..in addition [to] the remaining NSC files deal[ing] specifically with the Lockerbie bombing and the subsequent investigation which led to the indictment of two Libyan nationals….. are closed because of various security classifications”. (4)
As we know, literally all evidence regarding 9/11 has been under FBI lock and key for nearly 5 years. That includes the fact that no National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) crash reports were done on any of the four aircraft because the FBI took the investigation away from them, that the Pentagon videos confiscated by the FBI are not being released and that the “hijackers” remains have never been positively identified. (5)
I will highlight two specific details where Robert Mueller was directly involved in 9/11 evidence. One is the Flight 77 cockpit voice recorder and the other was the identities of the 19 “hijackers”.
The NTSB claimed:
“Over the next few days, working the 3 p.m. to morning shift, she and several other NTSB experts struggled to separate airplane parts from office parts. Early on the morning of Sept.14, while Cushman was at the site, the cockpit voice recorder, or CVR, was found.
It was quickly transported across the Potomac to the NTSB lab in Washington, D.C., where Cushman works with three other analysts, and its data was downloaded.
“Ordinarily, that would have been just the start of Cushman’s association with the device, but this time, it was the end. The events of Sept. 11 had already been classified as criminal acts, rather than accidents, so the FBI, which has its own forensic audio lab, took charge of the box and its data.
That’s also why Cushman can’t say much more about her role in that investigation, or about the work she did on the recorders recovered from Flight 93, which plowed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers apparently thwarted another hijacking. Like the Pentagon CVR, the black box from that plane came to NTSB only for the extraction of its data before being turned over to the FBI”. (6)
Robert Mueller had a different story:
“FBI Director Robert Mueller said Friday that the agency has gotten information from the flight data recorder recovered in the crash of American Airlines Flight 77, which slammed into the Pentagon.
He declined to say what information the FBI received from the recorder, which tracks an airplane’s flight movements for the last 25 hours. He said the agency had not gotten any information from the voice data recorder from Flight 77”. (7)
When it came to the identities of the alleged 19 hijackers Robert Mueller said, “that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt”. That is no surprise since the BBC has documented that a couple of them are alive and well. (8)
The FBI controlled every aspect of the Pentagon incident from start to finish. They still control it with total secrecy. How did they know to show up within minutes at the civilian video locations?
Why did the Pentagon originally claim to have no video surveillance? I believe the answers may lie in the statement that the FBI Director’s “star rose” under Bush Sr. and he already had Pan Am 103 under his belt. Maybe that’s why the evidence was snapped up and secured so quickly.
Russell Pickering
www.pentagonresearch.com
russellpickering@bresnan.net
FOOTNOTES
(1) http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1855852005
(2) http://www.fbi.gov/libref/directors/directmain.htm
(3) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1424760.stm
(4) http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/find/foia/1998-0034-F.pdf
(5) http://www.pentagonresearch.com/evidence.html
(6) http://www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/2002Spring/hear.html
(7) http://www.sptimes.com/News/091501/Worldandnation/FBI_analyzing_voice__.shtml
(8) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm
