The Truth is not always “Out There”!/Libya Now Versus Libya Then

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The Truth is not always “out there”!

A.K. Enamul Haque, PhD

With Philip Shaw M.Sc

The release of Abdulbaset Ali Al Megrahi from the Scottish Jail on August 20, 2009 on “compassionate grounds” has created an uproar in the US and in the western media for the past few weeks.  Bangladeshi media was, however, silent on this.  Explaining the release the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill said, “He is a dying man, he is terminally ill, …my decision is that he returns home to die.”   In his statement Mr. MacAskill was very much diplomatic and was not referring to the issues related to a possible “miscarriage of justice” and probably putting an innocent man into the jail for a crime that he might not have committed at all.
The US government including Mrs. Hillary Clinton, a Harvard lawyer, was quick to condemn the event and requested to Scottish government not to release him.  However, the fact was that within an hour of the Press release by Mr. MacAskill, a Libyan plane was ready to take Al Megrahi out of the UK. It happened very quickly and only a handful of people were there who booed at him while he was taken out of the prison to the plane.  Clearly, the Libyan government was well informed about it and a plane was waiting for him.  In Tripoli Gaddafi’s son gave him a heroic welcome and he was then put into a government house equipped with a live TV-link with Scotland prison office, who will continue to monitor him.  This was a condition of release.
The reactions from the victims are quite different.  Families of the victims of Pan Am 103 flight (where 270 persons were killed) from the US did not endorse it at all while many in the UK did not oppose so vehemently.  The reasons are, the UK victims were following the debate over the “miscarriage of justice” and were not fully convinced that Abdulbaset Ali Al Megrahi was the killer.  Remember the events since 1988?  After the incident, many stories came out about the possible killer or killer group.  Of them, there were theories that Iran was behind it, that Mossad was behind it, that Hizbollah was behind it, that CIA was behind it and so on.  It was after a so-called thorough investigation by the FBI and UK investigating teams, two possible suspects were zoomed in, they were AbdelBaset Ali Al Megrahi and al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.  In 1991, the British authorities indicted them.  The Libyan government opposed it but the British and US government stood firm behind their investigating teams.  Libya was put under sanctions from the US, UK and also from the EU.  Billion of dollars of Libyan assets were frozen.  In the end, Nelson Mandela intervened and persuaded Libyan leader Gaddafi to hand over the suspects for a trial under Scottish law in a neutral land in 1999.  Two Scottish judges completed the long trial and one of the suspects was acquitted.   Al Megrahi was sentenced to 27 years of jail to be served in Scotland.  The Libyan leader also was forced to accept a deal to compensate the families of victims (10 million dollar each) in order to release its frozen assets from US.
Al Megrahi always maintained that he was innocent.  His appeal was rejected in Scotland and a final review is now under process.  Many distinguished lawyers in Scotland now think that Al Megrahi would be not found guilty beyond reasonable doubts and so he might be a fall guy, imprisoned to contain the whims of the “great nations of the UK and US. There were two major witnesses against him.  First Mr. Gauci, a shop retailer in Malta, who identified Al Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes found in the debris in Lockerbie.  It was believed to be from the suitcase carrying the bomb.  The next witness was Mr. Ulrich Lampert from Switzerland, who identified that a broken circuit board found in the debris, which was originally sold by him to Libyan government. So, Al Megrahi, a Libyan Security Officer could have smuggled the bomb into the plane while it was taken off from Malta.  The verdict was that the Station Manager of the airport was innocent and Al Megrahi was found guilty.
In an affidavit sworn in Switzerland in July 2007 (available on the website www.lockerbie.ch) Lumpert now states that the fragment produced in court was in fact part of a non-operational demonstration circuit board that he himself had removed from the premises of MEBO, the company producing the board, and had handed over to a Lockerbie investigator on 22 June 1989 (six months AFTER the destruction of Pan Am 103).  Furthermore, Mr. Gauci, the other key witness, was interviewed more than 17 times by different investigators and now it appears that his testimonies during those investigations are inconsistent and so he could not be a reliable witness for the case.
There are many other stories surrounding the event too.  For example, Tony Blair was pivotal in signing a prison exchange agreement with Libya so that Al Megrahi could be transferred under Libyan custody.  That two of the Scottish banks are now in deep financial trouble and Libya is willing to support them out of the crisis and so the deal was struck.  That the UK is interested to invest in Libya and so it was important for them to come out clean from the event, that the key witness Mr. Gauci received a 2 million dollar bribe from CIA to testify against Al Megrahi, and so on.  Whatever may be the true cause for the release of Al Megrahi, I must say that I am impressed with the Scottish justice system, which is now considering a full review of the case and probably to clarify the matter that the investigation was not thorough.  It now appears to me that the 3 million dollar “trial” in the Netherlands was a fiasco too. The trial judge refused to hear some of the key submissions from the defense lawyers during the trial too.
Having said this, it now finally coming to two possible conclusions: a) the FBI and the UK investigating team behaved the same way as the CIA did to create “fake” evidences to convict two innocent persons in order to appease their governments to politically punish Gaddafi, so the true culprits could never be found, and b) that the same two agencies are now hatching a second plan targeting Iran or the Palestinians in order to sabotage a possible reconciliation effort by President Obama.  Finally, I must congratulate Mr. MacAskill; the Scottish justice secretary to take such a bold step in order upheld the Scottish principle of justice, whatever that may be.

Libya Now Versus Libya Then: So Much Has Changed.
By Philip Shaw M.Sc.
I find it hard to believe the conspiracy theory in which Enamul mentions in his piece this month.  In the West the Al Megrahi release is a cut and dry mistake, especially in North America.  Of course we will never know for sure exactly what happened but I for one took the evidence against Al Megrahi as gospel.  The destruction of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie Scotland was one of the worst atrocities of the 1980s.

It is hard to categorize how different things are now with regard to Libya and the West versus the way they were then.  Back in the 1980s Libya was looked at as a pariah state, which supported terrorism at almost every level.  Also too, it was an aggressor against some in sub-Saharan Africa such as a country of Chad.  Almost everything that Libya touched at that time when viewed through an American lens was not good.  When the Pan Am airline went down over Scotland Libya would surely be a prime suspect.

You might say and you might feel that was a long time ago.  It surely was.  It just so happens that both Enamul and I had a very good friend at the time who was from Libya and was studying with us at the University of Guelph in Guelph Ontario.  To make a long story short I would call this Libyan friend of mine the “Magic Man “because of his love for the Los Angeles Lakers.  Needless to say over a period of months and years that we spent together I would often debate with him the politics and geopolitics of Libya in the 1980s.

It’s probably a good idea to preface all my remarks by saying I have a deep respect for my colleagues on the other side of the world who see the world differently than me.  Certainly that is the raison d’être of this column as Enamul sees things from the developing world and I see them 12 miles from the United States.  That is exactly how my Libyan friend saw things at the time.  I would question him extensively about Libya’s role in the world and how it seemed to me to be a troublemaker but he would often retort back to me about some of the other troublemakers in the neighborhood such as Israel.  Needless to say we were good friends and still to this day I hear from the “Magic Man “from Libya.

Sometimes it’s easy to talk about international terrorism and geopolitical moves like they we are on some type a chessboard.  However, I remember very clearly in April of 1986 when the United States bombed Libya the reaction of my friend “the Magic Man “.  While I think some in the halls of academia felt that the American action might be justified my friend was beside himself for obvious reasons.  The Americans were bombing his homeland and I’m sure he was very concerned about friends and family.   That raid in 1986 certainly painted his view of the Americans.

Fast-forward to 2009 and we have a totally different world. Libya is now a friend of the West with Col. Qaddafi actually visiting Italy and American and British firms fighting over investing in Libyan oilfields.  So when Al Megrahi was freed from the Scottish jail on compassionate reasons and was welcomed back to Tripoli in what looked like a hero’s welcome it brought back many memories of a bad time.  The optics are what the optics are it was too bad for everybody involved.

I take issue with my friend Enamul on many of his points regarding the Al Megrahi release. Certainly I am not an authority on who did what but I was clearly in the camp that he was guilty.  Releasing him on compassionate grounds was humanitarian but the reception in Tripoli waxed salt in some still present wounds.  Mistakes were made and that certainly was one of them, it just goes to show sometimes that you cannot put the cat back in the bag after it’s been released.

In Canada we have had our own terrorist problems.  For instance, in the late 1960s French-Canadian terrorists killed a British envoy and blew up bombs across Québec.  At the present time some of these individuals live peacefully in Québec and some have even run in past federal elections.  That should serve as an example of how dicey it can get when people in the West criticize the release of “terrorists “in other lands.  Sometimes it is what it is and sometimes it’s in the eye of the beholder.

The Al Megrahi affair will certainly fade into history.  If you believe Enamul someday we will find out who actually took down Pan Am 103.  I believe it was Al Megrahi.  Looking in the rearview mirror sometimes we have the habit of twisting and rationalizing history.  Nobody can pick the pieces up that fell over Lockerbie and put them back together again.  It was tragic to say the least.  The challenge now is to get everybody to move on.