The Pan Am 103 Verdict
by William Blum*
Feb 3 2001
Posted with the kind permission of :
M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S - Making Sense of the Middle http://www.MiddleEast.Org
The papers are filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103. A Libyan,
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, was just found guilty of the bombing by a Scottish court in the Hague, his
co-defendant, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, being acquitted. At long last there's going to be some kind of closure for the
families. What's wrong with this picture? What's wrong is that the evidence against Megrahi is thin to the point of
transparency. The court verdict might be dubbed Supreme Court II, another instance of non-judicial factors clouding
judicial reasoning. The three Scottish judges can not have relished returning to the UK after finding both defendants
innocent of the murder of 270 people, largely from the UK and the US. Not to mention having to directly face dozens of
hysterical victims' family members in the courtroom. And with the full knowledge of the desires of Washington and
Downing Street as to the outcome. I have now read the entire 26,000-word Opinion of the Court which accompanied the
verdict. One has to do that, as well as being very familiar with the history of the case, as I am, to appreciate what
the judges did. I can only offer here a few examples of the many questionable aspects of the decision. The key charge
against Megrahi -- the sine qua non -- is that he caused a suitcase with explosives to be loaded at Malta airport and
tagged it so it would pass through Malta, Frankfurt and London airports without an accompanying passenger and without
being inspected. That by itself would have been a major feat and so unlikely to happen 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 is no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, no nothing, no evidence of any kind.
And the court admits 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." The court places great -- nay, paramount --
weight upon the supposed identification of Megrahi by a storekeeper in Malta as the purchaser of the clothing found in
the bomb suitcase. But this storekeeper had earlier identified several other people as the culprit, including one who
was a CIA agent. When he finally identified Megrahi from a photo, it was after Megrahi's photo had been in the world
news for years. Again, the court acknowledges the possible danger inherent in such a decision:
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 ten years after the event are of little
if any value.
The Opinion of the Court places considerable weight as well 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 try to squeeze as much mileage out of these events as they can, as if they had no
better case to make. But Megrahi was seemingly a member of Libyan intelligence, and last we all knew, Libya is entitled
to have an intelligence service, and intelligence agents have been known to act ... well, in mysterious ways, for
whatever assignment they're on. The court 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. We are also 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." Let's hope
that Megrahi is really guilty. It would be a terrible shame if he spends the rest of his life in prison because back in
1990, as the United States was preparing for war against Iraq and needed Syria and Iran as allies, Washington suddenly
dropped those two countries as the prime suspects in the plane bombing and -- seemingly from nowhere -- discovered
Libya, the Arab state least supportive of the US buildup to the Gulf War.
* William Blum is the author of "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" and "Killing Hope: US Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War 2"
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movement --------------------------------------------
END