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| | | | | | | 3. I don't want to come over all Fox Mulder
| | | | by chatsubo |  | | | at Wed 29 May 8:11am | score of 5 astute | | | | | | |
but the evidence that links the Libyans to the Lockerbie bombings is sketchy at best.
The British journalist Paul Foot has built up an impressive case that implicated the Iranian secret service as a revenge to the shooting down of an Iranian jet liner.
(And before you dismiss Paul Foot as a conspiracy nut, he is a long serving journalist whose previous investigations have resulted in murder convictions being overturned)
I enclose a quite cut and paste from a Guardian summary of Paul Foot's investiagtions:
'On January 31, after an eight-month trial, three Scottish judges, sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, found a Libyan intelligence officer, Ali Al-Megrahi, guilty of the Lockerbie bombing - Britain's biggest mass murder - acquitting his colleague, Khalifa Fhimah.
Two days earlier, 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 FO 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.
It was not only the lack of hard evidence - something the judges admitted in their lengthy judgment. The case was entwined, if the judges were right, in a sequence of remarkable coincidences.
Doubts about the prosecution's case and the judges' verdict are spelled out in Cover-Up of Convenience, published this week. Two journalists, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, examine in detail what Paul Foot has already succinctly written in Private Eye's special report, Lockerbie, The Flight from Justice.
For more than a year, western intelligence agencies pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril. It is not hard to see why. Two months before the Lockerbie disaster, German police arrested members of the PFLP-GC near Frankfurt where, according to the prosecution, the bag containing the bomb was placed on the Pan Am airliner.
Among those arrested was Marwan Khreesat, who was found with explosives and a Toshiba cassette player similar to the one said to have contained the bomb. Khreesat was released. It was later revealed he was a Jordanian double agent.
The Jordanians did not allow him to appear as a witness at the trial. Instead, he was interviewed by an FBI agent, Edward Marshman. Marshman described how Khreesat told him how he infiltrated the PFLP-GC, how a second Toshiba bomb had gone missing, and about his contacts with another member of Jibril's group, Abu Elias, said to be an expert in airline security.
Elias is mentioned in a report written by Mobdi Goben, another member of the PFLP-GC, shortly before he died. The Goben memorandum claims Elias planted the bomb in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese American passenger allegedly involved in a CIA-approved heroin-smuggling operation. The luggage used for these operations, it is claimed, bypassed normal security screening.
The prosecution asked a "foreign government", believed to be Syria, to hand over information about Goben's allegations. Syria refused. Syria was central to the original explanation. This was that the bombing was funded by Iran in retaliation for the mistaken shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes, over the Persian Gulf in July 1988.
There is a widespread view that the US and Britain changed their tack when they badly needed Syria's support, and Iran's quiescence, for the Gulf war after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They thus fingered the two Libyans, insisting they placed the bomb in an unaccompanied bag at Malta's Luqa airport, where it was transferred to the Pan Am plane at Frankfurt. An earlier Palestinian suspect, Abu Talb, had also visited Malta. He was later held in Sweden on terrorist charges and identified by the British as a prime suspect.
You don't have to look for conspiracies - maybe Jaafar's presence on the plane has an entirely innocent explanation - to question the prosecution's version of events. US authorities issued a series of specific warnings about a bomb threat before Lockerbie. These, and intelligence reports implicating Iran, were dismissed as speculative or hoaxes.
The evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner was extremely shaky. He was uncertain about dates and the weather that day. He told the police the purchaser was "six foot or more" and over 50. Megrahi was five foot eight inches and 37 at the time.
According to Ashton and Ferguson, replica MST-13 timers - implicating Megrahi but only presented as evidence after a long delay - were manufactured by the CIA but that information was not passed to the defence. The evidence of Abdul Giaka, a Libyan who defected to the CIA and star prosecution witness, was described by the judges as "at best exaggerated, at worst simply untrue".
The judgment is littered with assumptionread the entire comment...
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| | | | | | 17. Re: I don't want to come over all Fox Mulder
| | | | by NH4 |  | | | at Fri 31 May 11:30pm | score of 1 | | in reply to comment 3 | | | | | |
Even if Libya had nothing to do with the Lockerbie bombing, $2.7b is cheap to get out from under sanctions.
As for whether we should take such a deal, it seems to me the U.S. should be pleased that Khaddafi *wants* to get off the U.S. list of rogue states. Lots of nations could care less -- even as lots of nations that employ terrorism as a staple of policy *aren't* on that list.
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| | | | | | 5. Was Libya even responsible?
| | | | by holgate | | | | at Wed 29 May 8:29am | score of 5 astute | | | | | | |
My reading of this is essentially that Libya knows that, after the failed appeal for the one man convicted of the bombings, it's not going to get a proper hearing, and that it might as well do whatever's necessary to move on. The British investigative journal (and satire mag) Private Eye published a long, detailed pamphlet on the unanswered questions in the Lockerbie case: how one man could be convicted, and another acquitted, when the evidence for both was essentially the same; the way that the US shifted the blame away from the Gulf states just as it needed their support in the war to get Iraq out of Kuwait; the unreliable testimony of the Maltese witnesses; the unheard evidence of a security breach at Heathrow, which suggests that the case containing the bomb was loaded in London, rather than shipped from Malta through Frankfurt and then on to Heathrow. And the finger still points more convinvingly to a group of Palestinian extremists with Syrian connections, the PFLP-GC. I know that many of the relatives of those who died on Flight 103 feel that the trial failed to answer the real questions -- as one congressman said to them, "we'll never really know the truth" -- and any Libyan settlement will be a kind of confirmation of that false closure.
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| | | | | | | 10. Why not start lifting sanctions...
| | | | by CaptainLiberal | | | | at Wed 29 May 9:26am | score of 5 astute | | | | | | |
So, if Libya starts paying these people, why not start lifting sanctions. As far as I understand, we would like Libya to be a responsible member of the international community. Any country that is incredibly broke will never be that, because they don't have anything to lose.
Doesn't it make more sense in the long run to lift the sanctions and help them put together an economic package to rebuild their country. Aren't countries with stable and thriving economies less likely to sponsor terrorism, which might cost them all of the things they worked to build?
I've never understood the perpetual sanctions game. Where's the incentive for change? We seem to do a great job with the stick, but we have problems using the carrot.
Every dream turns into something on a T-shirt -- Shriekback
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| | | | | | 12. Re: Why not start lifting sanctions...
| | | | by switcha | | | | at Wed 29 May 11:12am | score of 1 | | in reply to comment 10 | | | | | |
I agree with your stick/carrot comment. Very astute. It seems to me, though, that the problem is the spirit of their offer. To me, it appears more as "buying their way" out of sanctions by leveraging these repayments as a condition.
If they can't afford it all at once, but they truly want to comply with the spirit of "repayment for the lifting sanctions" why can't they just say "We'll pay you in parts and when we're done, you will lift sanctions." Why is the burden of trust put on us? They were the ones who did "wrong". Or maybe something if we want to help them get started right away, remove one of the sanctions, let them repay, then lift all.
Pretty sticky situation, but if this isn't a serious offer, then it's just a ploy at smearing us when world sentiment of us is pretty negative already. By coming off as the bully who won't accept their "good hearted" offer, they win even if we don't budge.
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| | | | | 14. Re: Why not start lifting sanctions...
| | | | by projectpaperclip | | | | at Wed 29 May 12:41pm | score of 1 | | in reply to comment 12 | | | | | |
That's already part of their offer. They make the first payment, and want some UN restrictions lifted, then make another, more restrictions lifted. They are only requesting U.S. restrictions lifted for the last payment, but the U.S. is (somewhat stubbornly IMO) trying to be uninvolved in the negotiations, claiming it's solely between Libya, the families, and the UN (as if the U.S. had no role in shaping UN policy).
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| | | | | | 2. Strings Attached
| | | | by tarotXV |  | | | at Wed 29 May 7:37am | score of 4 informative | | | | | | |
The problem with this offer is that it comes with strings attached. The money doesn't come out all at once. Forty percent of the money would be released when the United Nations lifts economic sanctions against Libya. Another forty would come out when the US lifts economic sanctions. The last twenty percent would be doled out when the US removes Libya from its list of countries that sponsor terrorism. I don't think the US will go for those strings. Making an offer that you know the other party will refuse is not a serious offer.
You've all got to figure it out for yourselves.
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| | | | | | | 1. Qadaffi's Motive Is No Mystery
| | | | by Anonymous Idiot |  | | | at Wed 29 May 7:33am | score of 3 astute | | | | | | |
From the BBC:
"Under the proposed deal each victim's family would receive $10m, but the money would only be handed over piecemeal, as sanctions on Libya were lifted.
A senior US State Department official described the conditions which accompany the pay offer as 'outrageous' and said the US could not commit to lifting its sanctions unless Libya is in full compliance with security council demands."
Libya stands to make tens or hundreds of billions for its investment of less than three. If we're stupid enough to go along with the proposal, that is. While camel drivers like Qadaffi are pretty good at hiding out in the desert and stirring up the souk, their diplomacy is rather amateurish.
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| | | | | | 7. Oh! The insight!
| | | | by Miguel Agullo | | | | at Wed 29 May 9:09am | score of 1 astute | | in reply to comment 1 | | | | | |
Libya stands to make tens or hundreds of billions for its investment of less than three
The BIG problem with this sentence is that in fact a 3 billion dollar expenditure for Libya is almost out of the question in the first place, as it represents 10% of its GDP.
A senior US State Department official described the conditions which accompany the pay offer as 'outrageous'
Another senior U.S. official manages to say "Axis of Evil" without making people crack up.
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| | | | | 13. Re: Oh! The insight!
| | | | by kilroy |  | | | at Wed 29 May 12:31pm | score of 2 astute | | in reply to comment 7 | | | | | |
3 billion dollar expenditure for Libya is almost out of the question in the first place, as it represents 10% of its GDP.
That's one of the reasons that they're offering to pay it off sequentially. Libya isn't trying to make amends, they're trying to get a guaranteed investment: for each payment to a victim's family, they get a ten-fold return in trade.
Shit, if Libya actually gets us to agree to this deal, I want to buy stock in some Libyan firms (I was looking for a way to visit Cuba anyway).
You think people will still be using napkins in the year 2000? Or is this mouth vacuum thing for real?
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| | | | | | 4. blood money
| | | | by GeologyJoe | | | | at Wed 29 May 8:20am | score of 1 | | | | | | |
Libya is trying to Negotiate a deal which can't/ shouldn't be negotiated. The government is obviously trying to weasel out of sanctions put upon them for a reason.
Lift the sanctions now and we might as well add another country to the fray.
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| | | | | | 9. Do you know the reason?
| | | | by Miguel Agullo | | | | at Wed 29 May 9:17am | score of 1 | | in reply to comment 4 | | | | | |
Do you know the reason to maintain the Cuban embargo? Do you know the reason to be friends with Saudi Arabia? Do you know why Israel has no sanctions even though they have not complied with UN resolutions? Do you know that Libya is an oil producing country?
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