The making of a scapegoat

"DESPICABLE." "OUTRAGEOUS." "An utter insult and utterly disgusting."

The slurs flew fast and furious after Scottish officials released Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted for the 1989 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground.

Officially, Megrahi was released on humanitarian grounds--he is dying of cancer and has three months to live, according to doctors. That produced a round of yammering from right-wing blowhards unfamiliar with the concept of "humanitarian."

The volume got turned up even louder after some commentators decided the British government must have pressured Scottish officials to secure the release as part of a deal to gain greater access to Libyan oil. So we were treated to the spectacle of Fox News pundits expressing their shock that a government could sink so low in the pursuit of oil.

The Obama administration got on the bandwagon, too. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said a homecoming celebration that greeted Megrahi's arrival at the airport in Libya was "tremendously offensive."

Nowhere in Gibbs' comments--nor in the American mainstream media's coverage--was there a hint of why Libyans might celebrate Megrahi's return. His conviction is widely regarded elsewhere in the world--including among many families of British victims of the bombing--as a travesty of justice engineered by the U.S. government.

More to the point, it is a travesty that might have unraveled completely if Megrahi and his lawyers were able to continue with an appeal in the Scottish courts to reexamine the verdict. Success with that motion, said British writer John Palmer, "would show up the Scottish judiciary as at best hopelessly incompetent and at worst complicit in what one Lockerbie victim's parent has said was 'the charade of a case' against Megrahi."

Megrahi said in a statement after his release that he agonized over whether to accept the agreement that freed him, because it meant dropping his appeal:

I have been faced with an appalling choice: to risk dying in prison in the hope that my name is cleared posthumously or to return home still carrying the weight of the guilty verdict, which will never now be lifted. The choice which I made is a matter of sorrow, disappointment and anger, which I fear I will never overcome.

Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died on Pan Am Flight 103, echoed Megrahi's words. "I feel despondent that the West and Scotland didn't have the guts to allow this man's second appeal to continue," said Swire, who is the spokesperson for an organization of family members that has been demanding a public inquiry into what happened 20 years ago. "Because I am convinced that had they done so, it would have overturned the verdict against him."

MEGRAHI WAS convicted in 2001 of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing after an extraordinary 18-month trial, presided over by three Scottish judges, but held in the Netherlands.

Megrahi was accused along with another Libyan man, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah--both were employees of Libyan Arab Airlines at the airport in Malta, a country made up of a chain of islands south of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea. But though prosecutors argued the two worked as a team, Fhimah was found not guilty by a unanimous decision of the three judges--while Megrahi was found guilty, also unanimously.

This contradictory verdict matched the quality of the evidence against the two:

-- The prosecution's star witness was revealed to be a CIA informant who was paid more than $300,000 and resettled in the U.S. before the trial, stood to gain millions in reward money for testifying--and had to be interviewed 17 times by prosecutors before he came up with his "evidence."

Megrahi and Fhimah were accused of getting a suitcase bomb on an Air Malta flight from the airport where they worked. The suitcase was then allegedly transferred twice, at airports in Frankfurt, Germany, and London, to get it on Pan Am Flight 103. Prosecutors never produced any evidence that the two men did get a suitcase on the flight. But in any event, Air Malta has proved in court that all suitcases carried on its flight to Frankfurt were accounted for. When a British television producer repeated the prosecution's Malta flight theory in a documentary, the airline sued for libel and won.

The only evidence connecting Megrahi to the bomb was the testimony of a storeowner in Malta who said he remembered Megrahi bought clothing that ended up in the same suitcase as the bomb, according to an analysis of material found in the wreckage of the aircraft. But the storeowner didn't make this identification until 11 years after the bombing. He originally described a man who was bigger and older than Megrahi, and there is evidence that Megrahi wasn't even in Malta on the day he supposedly bought the clothes.

EVEN MORE incredible than the shoddiness of the case against Megrahi is the lengths to which the British and U.S. governments went to avoid accusing and prosecuting the seemingly obvious suspects.

The Lockerbie bombing took place four days before Christmas in 1989. Eighteen months before, the USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy cruiser on patrol in the Persian Gulf, shot down an Iran Air passenger plane, killing all 290 people on board.

U.S. officials claimed their ship mistook the giant Airbus for an attacking F-14 jet fighter, but that beggared belief, especially in the political context--the shootdown took place in the final year of the Iraq-Iran War, after the U.S. had swung more and more openly behind Iraq and its new favorite Middle East ally, Saddam Hussein.

George Bush Sr., then vice president under Ronald Reagan, declared, "I'll never apologize...I don't care what the facts are." When he took over the White House the following year, Bush decorated the Vincennes' captain with the Legion of Merit medal.

Anger in Iran at the U.S. attack was intense, and the country's leaders vowed revenge. A year later, the outlines of one possible attempt emerged.

Several men from a Palestinian splinter group not connected to the mainstream liberation movement and with a record of carrying out terrorist attacks were arrested in Neuss, Germany, a two-hour drive from the city of Frankfurt. Among the belongings of one was a bomb built into a Toshiba cassette recorder that was almost identical to the device that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 later that year. The German police released the men because of a lack of evidence.

In early December, the U.S. embassy received a phone call from a man who said that a Pan Am flight originating in Frankfurt would be blown up in the next two weeks by a Palestinian militant group. U.S. officials took the warning seriously--the State Department circulated it to European embassies, and as a result, personnel who typically took December Pan Am flights to return home for the holidays booked on other carriers.

Even without this information, speculation after the December 21 explosion immediately centered on Iran and Syria, not Libya. The evidence from the wreckage yielded the remains of the bomb similar to ones constructed by the men in Germany.

The conclusion seemed inescapable--Palestinian operatives, supported by Syria and financed by Iran, had avenged the shooting down of the Iranian plane. Three months after Lockerbie, a Cabinet minister from Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party government in Britain bragged to journalists that arrests were imminent.

Then George Bush Sr. stepped back into the picture.

According to a Washington Post report, Bush personally contacted Margaret Thatcher and urged that the Lockerbie investigation be made "low key," in his words, according to leaked accounts of the conversation. Thatcher apparently complied--there were no arrests or charges.

Why would the U.S. want to downplay allegations against Palestinian terrorists paid by Iran--then still public enemy number one in the Middle East, at least publicly?

Some of the shadowy events surrounding Lockerbie provided possible reasons.

For one thing, U.S. intelligence agents knew about the arrests in Germany, but apparently didn't move aggressively. Other revelations in Britain pointed in a different direction--that an embarrassing security breach at Heathrow Airport may have allowed the bombers to put the explosives on board there.

Investigators for Pan Am turned up a more startling possibility. They concluded that U.S. intelligence officials, seeking to free American hostages held in Lebanon, had struck a deal with Syrian drug dealers connected to the hostage takers.

In exchange for information about the hostages, the investigators claimed, CIA agents would route drugs from Lebanon into the U.S. in luggage that was exempt from normal airport security procedures. Interfor, the security firm hired by Pan Am, speculated that the drug dealers may have switched a suitcase containing a bomb with one filled with drugs.

Interfor further suggested that Charles McKeen, the head of a U.S. intelligence team traveling on Pan Am Flight 103, was coming back to Washington to blow the whistle on the drug operation--and that his colleagues may have looked the other way as the bomb plot developed.

If that seems far-fetched, it should be remembered that the White House was now inhabited by Bush, a former head of the CIA, and staffed by the men who came up with the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages operation under Reagan--selling military supplies to a country they publicly denounced as an enemy of peace in exchange for freeing American hostages in Lebanon, with the proceeds from the arms sales going to the right-wing contras fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

WHATEVER THE truth of these allegations, a major political shift in the Middle East soon provided an even more compelling reason for finding a new scapegoat for Lockerbie.

On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, threatening the flow of Middle East oil through the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration instantly denounced its recent ally as the "new Hitler" and began preparing the ground for the largest American military intervention since Vietnam.

Bush was determined to overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" by building a coalition of countries that would support a war on Iraq. Suddenly, Syria went from enemy to valuable ally in the battle against Saddam's tyranny. Syria's possible role in Lockerbie disappeared--as did Iran's when it made clear it would stay neutral in the coming Gulf War.

Libya under Muammar el-Qaddafi was one of the only Middle Eastern countries to resist U.S. incentives to join the "coalition of nations" against Iraq. In short order, U.S. propaganda replaced the Iranian regime with Qaddafi as the chief sponsor of terrorism in U.S. propaganda.

In November 1991, the U.S. and British governments finally ended their "low key" attitude toward Lockerbie with the announcement that they were charging two Libyan airline employees--Megrahi and Fhimah--with planting the bomb. All the previous references to the involvement of Syria, Iran or Palestine vanished. Bush himself explicitly said that Syria had gotten a "bum rap" on Lockerbie.

As British socialist and journalist Paul Foot wrote in the Guardian:

[T]he U.S. and British governments' propaganda machines worked night and day to rubbish the story they had so successfully peddled. Pretty well the entire media in Britain and the U.S. complied. Libya was denounced with the same stale invective previously reserved for the Iranians and Syrians.

None of the facts had changed. The only change was political. The new enemy of the Western powers was their former favorite, Saddam Hussein. In the Gulf War for a new world order, the ruthless Syrian dictator Assad was a vital ally. Iran was neutral. It was suddenly obvious that neither of these two governments could possibly have had anything to do with Lockerbie.

It seemed for a while that Libya would refuse to extradite Megrahi and Fhimah to stand trial. But in 1999, Qaddafi's government turned over the two men to be tried in the Netherlands. Sanctions against Libya were promptly dropped, and Western multinationals invested billions in Libya's oil industry. Another "Hitler" of the Middle East was transformed into an ally.

A campaign to show Megrahi's innocence continued after the travesty of his trial, with family members of the Lockerbie victims among its most committed activists. Former South African President Nelson Mandela traveled to Scotland to visit Megrahi in prison and declared his support.

Megrahi's lawyers lost their first appeal of his conviction, but were preparing for a second that they hoped would expose the facts of the frame-up for the world to see. It was this appeal that was short-circuited by the agreement that sent Megrahi home.

Megrahi does not have long to enjoy the freedom he deserves. As this article was being written, he was being treated in an intensive care unit of a hospital in Tripoli, according to reports.

But the U.S. political establishment still heaps slanders on him. Its callous attitude toward the truth is, in Foot's words, "a terrible indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and U.S. governments and their intelligence services. Which is probably why [that truth] has been so consistently and haughtily ignored."