Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction
Could PH/95 have come from clothes Jaafar was actually wearing?
Download 0.96 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Conclusion not feasible on whether the holdalls were hand luggage or other bags might have been checked in in Jaafar’s name
- No proof he was associated with the introduction of the primary suitcase
- The mysterious drugs suitcase found at Jimmie Wilson’s Tundergarth Mains farm
- The later addition to Wilson’s account: removal of the drugs suitcase by unidentified American agents
- Persistent denial by the British authorities of the finding of any drugs
- The drugs suitcase seen by Farmer Wilson and Jaafar’s checked-in luggage
- VII. The True Culprits 1. The road to Lockerbie: the inception of revenge
- Rubbing salt in the wound
Could PH/95 have come from clothes Jaafar was actually wearing? If the brown material really was a pocket, might it perhaps have been detached from a jacket or trousers, for example, which Jaafar might have been wearing at the time of the explosion? Could the pocket have perhaps caught on some sharp projection exposed by the disintegrating fuselage and been torn out of the garment as the young man was violently wrenched from his seat and sucked out into the maelstrom of the descent to earth? Was any jacket ever recovered? Was Jaafar’s corpse still in his trousers? Conclusion not feasible on whether the holdalls were hand luggage or other bags might have been checked in in Jaafar’s name Having regard to the above considerations and imponderables it is clearly not feasible to arrive at any realistic finite conclusion as to whether Jaafar’s holdalls went in the hold innocently as his two recorded check-in items or whether they were retained by him as hand luggage with two other bags being checked in under his name and not subsequently officially recovered. However, it is contended here that on the balance of probabilities it is more likely than not that Jaffar took one or both of them (probably both) with him into the cabin as hand luggage, that he checked in one other item, or as the case may be, two others, and that for reasons we shall come to they were never officially recovered. No proof he was associated with the introduction of the primary suitcase There is now a substantial body of information indicating that Jaafar maintained contacts with persons of Middle Eastern extraction present in West Germany who themselves had links with the terror group almost certainly responsible for the atrocity. Nonetheless so, it can be confidently maintained that there is no evidence capable of providing legal proof that the switched item was the primary suitcase. However, we can go further to assert that if Jaafar did check in a suitcase and if it was switched by handlers, the one thing the substitute bag definitely did not contain was the bomb. The reason is given in section (d), next. (d) Why Jaffar had nothing to do with the bomb Defending counsel certainly seemed to have scored a major hit in demonstrating the likelihood that Jaafar must have had at least one of the holdalls with him in the cabin. Since both were found in the same sector this would have meant that at Heathrow he had taken both with him into the cabin as hand luggage. Would it necessarily also have meant that a second checked-in item attributed to him ought to have been recovered at the crash site? Pan Am documentation showed that he had checked-in two items and yet no third or fourth bag attributed to him was ever found. This could have meant that one was the bomb bag while the other was illicitly removed from the crash site. Again, it could have meant that the fourth bag was left behind at Frankfurt or Heathrow and was simply mislaid, never to be found. Another possibility is that both the check-in items were left behind at Frankfurt or for some reason not transferred to Pan Am 103 at Heathrow. However, even if the various imponderables and inconsistencies about Jaafar’s luggage might justify suspicions that he may have been involved with a CIA-protected drug running cartel the Interfor report and, in so far as he was trying to pin the blame on a bomb-loaded suitcase switched for Jaafar’s, al-Megrahi’s counsel were plainly wrong in suggesting he had anything to do with the bomb. They were wrong for the very reason that the Crown were wrong in contending that the bomb came from Malta. As already argued (exhaustively if not exhaustingly) it is certain that the suitcase containing the bomb which brought down Pan Am 103 did not and indeed could not have come to Heathrow by air from Malta or Frankfurt. (e) Conjectures about Khaled Jaafa Jaafar on a protected drugs run? So if Jaafar did check in two suitcases and both ended up in the hold of Maid of the Seas but the bomb had nothing to do with either bag or a substitute for one or other of them what happened to these missing pieces of luggage. On what errand exactly was Jaafar engaged? It may be assumed that his main purpose in taking the flight to the United States was to return home to be with his immediate family in Dearborn for the public holiday season. However, might his journey conceivably also have had the purpose of shepherding a consignment of drugs under the aegis of the alleged CIA umbrella? His nervousness as observed by the witness Yasmin Siddique is certainly consistent with the behaviour of someone who had been recruited as a courier and if that were the case it is more likely, as argued earlier, that the scheme to smuggle drugs was carried out by means of a bag switch rather than that drugs were placed in his own bag by handlers after check-in (see above, “Working the switch”). If this was a drugs run under the CIA umbrella there is not the slightest reason why it should have had anything at all to do with the bomb on board Pan Am 103, a quite separate venture. The reason why it has long been suspected that there was a connection with the planting of the bomb is essentially that there appears to be a network of identifiable links between persons with whom Jaafar had some sort of association and others thought to have maintained links with the terrorist group suspected of culpability for Lockerbie. It is not intended to set out here an account of these links nor of the various inconsistencies between the account of Jaafar’s friends and associates about their contacts with Jaafar leading up to and on 21 December, 1988. It may be prudent to avoid massaging the links and inconsistencies into something more significant than may be warranted by the rumours and innuendos which have circulating since 21 December 1988. (For useful coverage see eg Ashton, Megrahi, at pp.125-126, 190-191, 246-247 and 336-340.) It is easy to see that there may well have existed a network of social contacts between various young Middle Eastern Arab men based in West Germany some of whom may have had connections with the terrorist group responsible for the bombing and some with a quite separate drug smuggling ring which, if it existed, had entered into an agreement to work with the CIA team in securing the release of hostages in the Lebanon. It is a long step from the existence of such links to conjecturing that the bombers used Jaafar’s willing participation in a drug run to plant the Lockerbie bomb. The mysterious drugs suitcase found at Jimmie Wilson’s Tundergarth Mains farm To conjecture that Jaafar was on a drugs run protected by the CIA and that a suitcase containing drugs was on board Pan Am 103 and was either his own or one which had been switched with it at Frankfurt but which had nothing to do with the bomb is not to pluck some fancy out of the air. There exists tolerably reliable evidence supporting such a proposition. On the morning of 24 December Jimmie Wilson, who farmed Tundergarth Main Farm three miles from Lockerbie, saw a leather travelling bag surrounded by sheep in one of his fields in Sector D. It had burst open and attached to it was a red and white ribbon, indicating that it had already been found by a searcher and marked for collection. It seemed to have been forgotten so Wilson called the police and an officer whom Wilson did not know and who did not give his name came to collect it. The bag contained brightly coloured clothes and bore a label marked “Robbi” which did not match the name of any passenger on Pan Am 103. As Wilson was helping the officer to put the contents into a plastic bag they found a wide khaki webbing belt and Wilson caught a glimpse of clear plastic packages of white powder wedged in pouches on the belt. In an account of the episode first published in Emerson and Duffy’s book The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation, at pp.85-87, Wilson was quoted as recalling the officer saying “Uh oh, I know what we got here” and although the officer did not actually use the word “drugs” he did say that the powder was “of substantial value.” The officer refused to be drawn but did say “We know about this one.” Signficantly perhaps also the contents of the leather bag included what the authors described as a shorthand notebook with pages smudged by the rain. Perhaps Wilson assumed the book was for shorthand because the writing seemed to be shorthand, although it may be observed that shorthand can resemble Arabic characters. Another drugs find The incident in which Jimmie Wilson saw bags of white powder in the suitcase on his farm was not the only occasion when suspected heroin was found which was believed to have come from the plane. In an interview with John Ashton a search volunteer told him that on the night of the crash he was combing Lockerbie Golf course when he saw a search-and-rescue dog paying close attention to an object that turned out to be a cellophone packet containing a white powder which appeared to be heroin (Ashton and Ferguson, Cover-Up for Convenience, p.23; Megrahi, p.55). The later addition to Wilson’s account: removal of the drugs suitcase by unidentified American agents In their account of the episode Emerson and Duffy did not state what action they understood the officer took after bagging up the suitcase and contents, nor what may have followed. However, in their 2001 book Cover-Up of Convenience Ashton and Ferguson quoted the account of “an anonymous source” who stated that instead of taking the bag to the Dexstar warehouse (where items from the crash were being stored) the unidentified officer contacted headquarters for instructions and then waited until some Americans turned up in a four-wheel drive vehicle and took the suitcase away with them (p.23; reiterated in Megrahi, p.55). If Wilson had told Emerson and Duffy about this it is difficult to imagine that they would have forgotten to mention it or that as fearless reporters they would have deliberately excised it from their published account. Could Wilson have suppressed it as a result of having been put under some pressure? Was he the anonymous source who opened up to John Ashton years later? In Cover-Up of Convenience (p.76) Ashton and Ferguson disclosed that the victims’ relatives hoped the Fatal Accident Inquiry would resolve unanswered questions about drugs and assumed that when they gave evidence Wilson and his wife would be asked about the incident. They were not and the authors noted (at p.78) that Wilson, always a private man and, with his wife understandably distressed by the media intrusion into their lives, has never publicly acknowledged the drug find. Persistent denial by the British authorities of the finding of any drugs Successive governments have always denied that apart from a small quantity of cannabis for personal use no drugs were ever found at the crash site. That was the response of the Lord Fraser, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, to a letter from Tam Dalyell MP about Jimmie Wilson’s account (letter to Dalyell, 3 July, 1992: Ashton and Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience, p.77). The MP got the same response from Tony Lloyd MP, Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 11 June 1997 (see Megrahi, p55 and n.50). Attempts by the Rev. John Mosey, whose 19-year-old daughter Helga had perished on board Pan Am 103, to urge the police to interview Jimmie Wilson were plainly met with procrastination and prevarication. In support John Ashton and Ian Ferguson wrote to Lord Fraser, who replied that he understood Wilson had been “interviewed again and offered no evidence to support the account of the discovery of a large quantity of heroin in one of the fields.” By all accounts Mr Wilson was a no-nonsense individual with no reason to invent stories about white powder and non-existent Americans. There are a legion of accounts in the literature on Lockerbie of nameless American officials acting as a law unto themselves at the crash site in the the days after the atrocity. They can hardly all have been invented. The drugs suitcase seen by Farmer Wilson and Jaafar’s checked-in luggage Despite the “Robbie” label and the colourful underwear in the suitcase which Farmer Jimmie Wilson saw in Sector D could it have been the one switched with Jaafar’s checked-in bag at Frankfurt? It is by no means inconceivable that Jaafar was involved as a one-off drugs mule and that there had indeed been a suitcase switch. His nervous manner at passport control would certainly be consistent with such involvement. If there had been a deal of the kind suggested by Interfor the rogue CIA group would certainly have known that a consignment was on board Pan Am 103 and it might well have been considered prudent to seize it at the crash site in order to avoid any questions being asked and the deal being rumbled. The last thing the CIA officials involved would have wanted was to be called to account for letting a gang smuggle hard drugs into America. VII. The True Culprits 1. The road to Lockerbie: the inception of revenge If the bomb was smuggled landside to airside at Heathrow or otherwise surreptitiously delivered air to airside there by an aircrew confederate of the terrorists the case against al-Megrahi and indeed in favour of Libyan culpability falls entirely away. (It is understood that this did not curb efforts by certain elements within the American intelligence/law enforcement establishment from endeavouring to acquire evidence of al-Megrahi’s presence in London in the run-up to the bombing.) Since the evidence compellingly establishes that it was knowingly and purposively planted in container AV4041 at Heathrow and consequently exonerates Libya we need to ask who are to blame for the destruction of Pan Am 103? Who were the true culprits? (a) The Iran-Iraq war draws to an end In September 1980 Iraq’s leader, President Saadam Hussein, ordered a massive attack on Iraq and so began the Iran-Iraq War which was to last some eight years. At the end of 1986, after Iran had already lost half a million soldiers, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini, launched Operation Karbala, hailed as the “final offensive.” Over fourteen weeks Khomeini threw at Iraq’s fortified positions wave upon wave of basij¸the so-called militant volunteers who were mainly young boys and old men and who were slaughtered in their tens of thousands. Serious oppposition to the war among the Iranian public was at last beginning to mount and became virtually irresistible two years later when, on February 29, 1988, Iraq fired several Scud missiles for the first time at central Teheren. The barrage continued until abruptly coming to an end on April 20. Thousands of Iranians poured onto the streets to protest against their government’s inability to protect them and Khomeini finally got the message. He re-established diplomatic ties with France and began moves to do the same with the United Kingdom and Canada. He also approved the appointment as armed forces commander-in-chief of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani, the influential speaker of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, who was to be elected to the Presidency the following year. Rasfanjani was widely viwed in the West as a moderate and pragmatist, a man with whom sensible business could be done. His brief was to bring the war to an end and in June 1988 he approved final negotiations for a ceasefire and UN Security Council Resolution 598 for the formal end of hostilities with Iraq. (b) Doctrinal split among the Iran leadership cadre: extremists versus moderates Opposing the increasingly influential Rasfanjani and his moderate power base in the Majlis was Hojatoislam Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, the powerful Interior Minister since 1985, whose devout and fundamentalist creed was followed by the komitehs, the entrenched groups of informers and bureaucrats who enforced social and political conduct across the whole of Iranian society. As will be described later Mohtashemi also exercised huge influence over the Hezbollah, the Shi’ite fundamentalist movement he had created in the Lebanon prior to his ministerial appointment. Mohtashemi was absolutely committed to the primacy of the Islamic revolution and its export to other Moslem countries. In the war against Iraq he was a diehard believer in the slogan “War until Victory” an objective to which the pragmatist Rasfanjani paid only lip service. With Khomeini having handed to Rasfanjani the job of securing peace with Iraq and with a final settlement in the offing there was little Mohtashemi could do to halt the imminent sharp decline in his influence, since he could hardly voice explicit criticism of the Supreme Leader for seeking to bring the war to an end, However, at the beginning of July 1988 an event occurred which was to provide as near perfect an opportunity to reverse his declining fortunes as any he could have wished. (c) Disaster in the Gulf IranAir flight 655 By the end of 1987 the United States was lending unashamed support to Iraq in its war against Iran and as Iranian power was beginning to crumble, and even as the war was about to end in a final ceasefire, so was Iran’s hostility intensifying against the “Great Satan,” the current patron of its ancient Babylonian adversary. With the US maintaining a strong naval presence in the Gulf to protect oil shipments out of Kuwait clashes with Iran were inevitable. On the morning of July 3, 1988, a helicopter assigned to the Aegis class guided-missile cruiser Vincennes drew fire in international waters from three missile- equipped Swedish-made Boghammer fast patrol boats of the Iranian navy. Half an hour later the ship’s radar picked up an approaching unidentified aircraft described by the ensign watching one of seventeen digital screens in the the ship’s command information centre (CIC) as “descending” in “attack mode.” The ship’s commander, Captain Rogers, could not immediately assume the aircraft was hostile but, having regard to its supposed angle of descent as reported from the CIC and its point of origin as somewhere in Iran, it was clearly regarded as posing a potential threat. Ten internationally recognised “IFF” (“identify friend or foe”) signals were dispatched over the next five minutes but there was no response and the aircraft continued its approach. The Aegis was the world’s technically most advanced class of warship and the Vincennes’ computer system produced an analysis on the basis of which its operators concluded that the aircraft was an Iranian F-14 Tomcat jet fighter. That judgment call was reinforced by the perceived symbolism involved in attacking an American warship on the eve of Independence Day. Futhermore, inaction had infamously led to heavy damage and loss of life on the USS Stark a year before. Although a Tomcat would have been incapable of inflicting any very significant damage to the heavy armour plating of the Vincennes it could easily have dispatched the helicopter. Two surface-to-air missiles were launched at the approaching aircraft but, tragically, it turned out to be an Airbus 300 making the short hop from Bandar Abbas to Dubai on IranAir flight 655 with 290 passengers and crew. The disaster was the clear consequence of a catastrophic conjunction of errors:
According to the USS Sides commander and others the Vincennes command personnel had shown a marked lack of caution, had evinced a consistently overaggressive approach to their mission in the Gulf and in the wardrooms of the Gulf fleet the ship had been given the nickname “RoboCruiser”. (See, generally, Emerson, S. and Duffy, B. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation, New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1990, above, pp.56-59, and see also Katz, above, pp.191-193.) Rubbing salt in the wound Although US President Ronald Reagan sent a written apology via Swiss intermediaries the Administration’s apparent failure to show more fulsome, sincere, contrition, contrarily indeed their inept attempt to justify the tragedy as the consequence of a legitimate measure of self-defence and their insensitive awarding to the hapless ensign – officially the “air warfare co-ordinator” – of a medal for “heroic achievement,” all rubbed salt in the wound and only served to turn the original assessment on its head: absurdly, the Iranians claimed that the destruction of flight 655 had betokened a celebration of July the Fourth (see, eg, Roger, C., “Sea of lies: The inside story of how an American naval vessel blundered into an attack on Iran Air flight 655 at the height of tensions during the Iran-Iraq war – and how the Pentagon tried to cover its tracks after 290 innocent civilians died,” Newsweek, July 13 1992, http://www.newsweek.com/id/126358; Ashton and Ferguson, above, chap. 2). Retaliation predicted Predictably enough in the nature of traditional Iranian fundamentalism, public demands for revenge in like measure were clarion and certain elements within the upper strata if the Iranian body politic were not slow to see a political advantage in capitalising on that strength of feeling. The Americans inevitably feared retaliation like for like. The CIA, for example in its Terrorism Review at the end of July 1988, assessed the risk of terrorist retaliation as “high,” noting that although the more moderate and pragmatic figure of Hashemi Rasfanjani was intending to take the “diplomatic high road,” Ayotollah Khomeini, had threatened retaliation equal “to the magnitude of the crime” (“Focus: the Shoot down of Iran Air 655: Will Iran Retaliate?” Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Terrorism Review, 28 July, 1988, http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs_full.asp 11 June, 2010, cited by Davina Miller, “Who Knows about this . . .” above, p.1, col. 1; release online of the CIA assessment was foreshadowed nearly two decades earlier by Samuel Katz, seemingly based on personal briefings: see Katz, S.M, Israel Versus Jibril: the thirty-year war against a master terrorist, New York: Paragon House, 1993, at p.193). The Review conjectured that the “political situation in Teheran . . . will probably cause Iran to turn to surrogates when it decides to retaliate for the shoot-down.” What the CIA clearly had in mind was the destruction of a fully laden American passenger plane departing from somewhere in Europe, with its concentration of American military personnel and established presence of Middle Eastern terrorist cells. Directory: docs docs -> Application for acem docs -> Observational Assessment of Teaching Practices Teaching Assessment Initiative Proposal Submitted to The Teachers for a New Era project docs -> Traditional British values docs -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization docs -> Borzoi Club of America Register of Merit Program I. What is a Register Of Merit docs -> Protecting the rights of the child in the context of migration docs -> United Nations E/C. 12/Esp/5 docs -> 9th May 1950 the schuman declaration docs -> Getting To Outcomes® in Services for Homeless Veterans 10 Steps for Achieving Accountability Download 0.96 Mb. Share with your friends:
|