AMERICANS... (sigh)

MISSING COMPREHENSION AND THE MISSING BOMBER MYTH
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
January 11 2010

The British Story
I’d like to here explore the ugliness and stupidity of the American mind by looking at commentary over a narrow issue – the December 2009 allegation that “Lockerbie bomber” al Megrahi, supposedly locked under House arrest in Libya, had gone “missing.” It tied in perfectly with anger over the Scottish decision to release the dying bomber, and his failure to die within three months. Many Americans were again enflamed to anti-Arab, ant-Obama, anti-Scottish, and anti-British sentiments.

Interestingly, the story has almost no substance, and originated in the U.K., almost as if to stir up such noise. It started with a reporter from the Times of London who came snooping around Megrahi’s house on Sunday evening, December 13. For two days he couldn’t get any Libyans there to explain to him, in English, where the killer was - they seemed to indicate he was gone, and then probably tried to shoo the reporter off. Megrahi was found to not be at his usual hospital either, so the Times then called the East Renfrewshire council about a possible violation of his house arrest.

As the ones responsible for keeping tabs on him (with phone calls scheduled every second Tuesday), the East Renfrewshire council is a small-time political force, ridiculously over their heads if called on to collect a fugitive bomber overseas for a violation. On the 15th (an off Tuesday, normally), they took the news and swiftly made an unscheduled call demanding to speak with al Megrahi and clear up the situation.

Unfortunately, as reported, the man who answered (at an unspecified hour, local time) insisted the convict was too ill to come to the phone. Whatever he was thinking, during or after the call, just who he was, we do not know. But this was told to the Times but not believed by them, and the story blew up immediately, with the scoop “Mystery as Lockerbie bomber goes missing from home and hospital.” It was posted shortly after midnight GMT on Wednesday, December 16. The first comment at 12:22 was prophetic: “Born-yesterday idiots. What did they expect?” The major theme (see below) emerges immediately. It’s likely just what the Times was thinking, or wanted others to think, as they made the assumptions needed to release such a slanted story. Others picked it up, and predicted a brewing "crisis" for Scotland.

Within ten hours, the article was exposed as perhaps nothing more than a hyped misunderstanding. The Manchester Guardian was the first to announce, at 9:52 am, "concern over the whereabouts” of Megrahi “has eased after East Renfrewshire council was able to contact [him] this morning,” at approx 9:30 am (10:30 Libya time). After that, "officials had no concerns regarding Megrahi's whereabouts and would not be taking the matter further.” But it had already been taken further and wasn't going to be brought back.

The Times corrected the record with “Growing suspicion over 'missing' Lockerbie bomber” at around 4:00 pm judging by the times on the 13 comments (The alarming article from hours earlier mustered 75 responses.) Herein they started self-referentially “The Lockerbie bomber resurfaced yesterday, but not before questions had been raised about the arrangements for monitoring a man convicted of killing 270 people.”

And these questions resounded in the following days, especially in the UK, where passions run high and almost equal numbers believe him innocent as guilty. My interest though is in comments on the episode on American news pages, far less of which covered the story.

The American Response: Nuke 'Em
I’ll start first on the Liberal side of the spectrum, which tends to run closer to the middle on this particular issue. Liberal pundits and bloggers, however they treat the whole Lockerbie subject, tended to ignore this brief lost-and-found myth, with the notable exception of the Post (of Araiana Huffington), reporting with little comment on the “missing” but not found part. It seems Liberal comment posters tended to believe Megrahi really was gravely ill, and therefore was probably dead, in a good riddance sense. This erred presumption and its resolution plus an intelligent commenter (aptly “EuroMom”) pointing out Megrahi’s actual innocence, kept the jingoism from getting as thick as it might. Of 32 comments, these are the most “American” among them.

“The free world will never understand terrorists, until they stop assuming terrorists have the same values they have.”

“It's dreadful that he was released, but of course that's nothing compared to the outrage that Bush let Kadaffi, and Libya, off the hook and lifted sanctions.”

“Have they tried calling Muammar Ghadafi? They could be having breakfast together.”

“Seriously, the Brits are suprised that this guy isn't calling them? Nobody could see this coming? We all better pray this guy doesn't decide to blow another airliner out of the sky. Thanks England.”

Liberals seem a bit divided and unsure, trying to be American while bashing Bush, and hate the baddies while appearing culturally enlightened. American Conservatives, on the other hand, were far more unequivocal about the story, and discussed it with more gusto by far. They are less likely to believe he was really ill as reported, and almost entirely sure he was not only still alive, and probably up to more evil. They also tend to demand military destruction quite frequently. Consider the “Amerithot” presented by these comments following an American Thinker story “Where’s the Lockerbie Bomber?”

“…the perp is probably already in Pakistan working on the syllabus for Spring Quarter at the TTC (Terrorist Training Camp).”

“All people like Obama will get for this is people killed.”

“There is no doubt in this citizen's mind that the Islamofascists are amused with the leverage they get from liberal rot.”

“why didn't we arrest this panty waste when he was here. or better yet why not find out where he is as he likes to rub it in our face and send some people to go extradict him.”

“Not that it would be too effective, but why can't we issue some kind of sanctions against Scotland? We must have too many Scotch drinkers in DC for that to work. What a disgrace. When is the US going to collectively wake up and realize what we are doing by accepting this kind of action?”

“How many millions need to die before the idiots in the West get real and do what needs to be done. Exterminate these vermin like the animals they are.”

That last, I presume, referred not to the Scots, but to Arabs, or Muslims, or just Islamofascist terrorists, or other who refuse the Light of Christ and understand only the sword/missile. And even then you have to repeat yourself many times.

For more real insight into these Arab bad guys and their vast conspiracy to enslave the world using Liberals and Europeans, one can always count on the professional observers of Jihad Watch. Surprise, surprise: Lockerbie bomber disappears.

“Didn't those objecting to the release of this criminal warn this would happen? The outrage should be driven home with all the force possible, straight back at the British. I would rather place trust in a deceitful muslim than the British, at least you know the muslim will lie to you.”

“This is what will happen when we bow to Islam. It is not worth it. For the moment it may seem to be, but what about tomorrow? What about our children and grandchildren? There is no respect for international law or legal agreements in Islam. Just their own agenda and goal to take over!”

“Just fire a dozen Cruise missiles to Tripoli.”

Michelle Malkin posted only after the "missing bomber" was found and added only "anyone else find this phone tag game with a murderous jihadists completely insane?" No, and the sanity just poured in with 45 messages, truly "American" every one. The best:

“So the lad decides to skip-what are the Brits going to do-send a Man-o-War to Tripoli? The Brits sold their soul for oil deals and can dance to Tripoli’s tune. And what will Barack Hussein Obama do? He will congratulate the Colonel for a game well played. Eric Holder can send a Letter of Concern and give the Libyans a good laugh. Most of the victims were Typical White People-maybe Little Eichmannns- so it really does not matter.”

“I bet Megrahi is living it up on the beach with a bunch of belly-dancing babes, smoking a hookah, and laughing at the Euroweenies who bought his fatal cancer story.”

“Idiot Europeans. There will come a day when they need someone to bail them out of another national crisis, much like WWII. Will anyone help?”

"We should take a page out of his play book, and strap a bomb to him. If he leaves his house, he explodes. At least it will take care of his cancer; that is if he really has it."

"Eh … strap him to the back of a Tomahawk missile and send it through Ahmagaynutjob’s living room window."

“For every day [Megrahi] is MIA, there should be a sortie of F-111’s dropping some bombs on various government buildings in Tripoli … for Old Times Sake”

On that last doozy, it seems this person is saying as long as he remains confused by a news story related by a right-wing pundit, he would authorize endless death on a foreign people he doesn’t approve of. Now I’m reminded why true Democracy simply cannot work with this many total fucking idiots around. Unfortunately, they’re shaped by those at the top of the food chain, who cultivate this ignorance and mobilize these same aggressive attitudes to bolster their own better-informed and thoroughly wicked strategems.

"IT IS UNBELIEVABLE"

ON DR. WYATT'S REPLICATIONS OF THE PA103 BLAST
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
January 9 2010

The BBC have a checkered history dealing with Lockerbie affair, from a dry but brilliant 1999 Dispatches episode to a 2008 Conspiracy Files one that tried for slick but felt just slimy with politicized distortions. They’ve now added a large bright patch with their approval a recent Newsnight episode, with Peter Marshall reporting on doubts about the key forensic clue in the case against Libya. It’s an encouraging development, a reminder that to some journalists, truth still matters more than politics after all, and the BBC will even allow those to speak up sometimes. (Or is there politics too behind a shift in perceptions at this time? Possible hidden subtexts will be considered in light of future political moves…)

Aired on Friday, 8 January, the program is currently viewable (to me anyway) here. It deals largely with circumstantial problems with the discovery and handling of the crucial timer fragment PT/35(b). Central to establishing a Libyan link to the bombing, it’s been especially bogged down with a slew of valid questions, recounted by Marshall and nothing new to me – no chemical tests to determine if it was in an explosion, unusually changed evidence label, incredulity over the slowness of identification, perhaps hints of backdating records to cover for an item planted later, etc.

James T. Thurman, the FBI political scientist credited with the visual match between PT/35(b) and a Libyan MST-13 timer, was interviewed again. He gave his usual story (more or less), saying “ahhtem” way too often. Marshhall tries to corner Thurman on failing to do real forensics and relying solely on a visual pattern-match. But this seems a little off-track on a reasonably important distinction; Thurman’s visual ID work, replicable by any trained parrot, was to identify the source of the fragment, not to replace forensic tests. The British scientists at RARDE were tasked with this (If I’m not mistaken), but it was not done, they said, as it was redundant – the fragment was clearly in the explosion, as that's what they were investigating, and the shirt collar it was lodged in was torn and burnt (and NOT labeled "made in Malta, to quibble on a small error made in the video).

Otherwise the program is excellent, mostly for what’s really new about it and has people talking - new experimental evidence indicating PT/35(b) would have never been found if it were in the explosion. These were carried out by a Dr. John Wyatt, an explosives expert retired from the British Army, with decades of hands-on experience. Currently he heads a security consulting company called SDS, and is blast consultant for the United Nations, Europe and North Africa region. The details behind how he came to test the official scenario – twenty times over - is unclear at the moment, and so far there’s been no detailed report of his methodology and precise findings. But as it appears, another serious blow to Megrahi's conviction and Libya's vilification has been landed squarely.

From what Marshall explains in voice-over, Dr. Wyatt carried out his twenty tests over time, starting with the radio bomb detonated by itself. One sample he showed the cameras is at right, a suitcase filled with random clothes, and a radio (different model than alleged, a bit larger), rigged as a bomb and set in a homemade cardboard box. Another he showed contained yet another type of radio, bright red, and a suicase he says is the same model used for PA103 (Samsonite hardside). Both were soon after blown up with the pat of plastic explosives tucked inside. Of the consistent results, Wyatt told Newsnight:

“I must admit, since the quantity of explosives we were using was only three or four hundred grams, I thought there were going to be some remnants of the radio left. But it – it – (chuckling) it just totally disintegrated. I mean really just went into tiny, tiny bits."

Wyatt elaborated a bit on method to The Times of Malta, specifying a separate timer was included and considered, as well as the general radio unit, and that the tests were done in varying conditions.

"We tried exploding the device on its own; in a radio similar to the one it was supposed to have been planted in; in a suitcase with and without clothes; surrounded by other suitcases and, eventually, in a container. In all tests, the timer and the circuit board were completely destroyed."

He later “built the tests up” to a finale – a dozen or so pieces of luggage piled in an airliner luggage container, arranged among other containers, and detonated in a field, videotaped from several viewpoints. This last was the only outdoors test; he told the Times he had done the other 19 indoors, “to make sure we could collect all the evidence.” Collecting the remains is what it was all about, of course, and so they used sparse concrete rooms (rather than a hundreds of square km countryside) and “we even painted the circuit board bright yellow to make it easier to identify any fragments among the debris. In no circumstance did we find any fragment," Dr Wyatt explained. Presumably he means no fragments of the scale of PT/35(b), since elsewhere he does mention “tiny tiny bits.” Perhaps the yellow was simply cooked off in all cases?

At right is a dramatic image from one of the tests, in a darkened room and greatly slowed down. The curly stuff is presumably the "hard-side" suitcase material, the little bars parts of its frame. The white-hot cluster at center is that 3-400 grams of explosive, semtex it should be, consuming the whole radio and vaporizing/weaponizing everything around it. Do consider that the bomb penetrated the plane's hull, after losing force bursting from the luggage container, after tearing through the suitcase lining, surrounding clothes, cardboard box, and the radio's plastic casing. The timer would be got to right away, before any energy was lost in an of those battles. Is Wyatt's testing just an elaborate (and expensive) way of proving the patently obvious?

Consider the "trial loading" below used at trial (best quality I could find, labels unreadable). This is the alleged bomb - a Toshiba RT-SF16 "Bombeat" radio with explosive, a detonator rod, battery (upper right label?) and MST-13 timer all fitting in a remarkably small case. It has the cassette assembly, about 4 inches wide, removed to allow the pat of semtex (312 grams of Semtex-H, most sources say - about 11 ounces). This makes the timer, it seems, no more than two inches from that origin of the blast - inches of mostly air, not lead. It's a chunk of this unit that survived and proves Libya's guilt? Do these people feel anything would be vaporized by an explosion like that? I feel stupid for ever even entertaining the notion.

The official story line, that whole nations have moved by, is of course that a surviving bit of circuit board from within a supposedly similar explosion was found, in a non-controlled environment (southern Scotland). Furthermore, it was a strangely readable portion of a board solidly associated with Libya alone (more or less), and constituted proof of Libyan responsibility. Presented by Newsnight host Peter Marshall with this basic notion, Dr. Wyatt stopped precisely this far short of calling it all a grand farce:

"Obviously these things are not impossible, we only carried out 20 tests, we didn't carry out 100 or 1,000 tests, but in every of those 20 tests we found absolutely no sign at all. So I find it highly improbable that you would find anything like that, particularly at 10,000 feet when bits are dropping into long wet grass over hundreds of miles. […] I do find it quite extraordinary and I think highly improbable, and most unlikely that you would find a fragment like that – I mean, it is unbelievable.”

---

AN ADMISSION OF GUILT?

De Borchgrave's Allegation and its Malta Problem
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
January 4 2010
last update 1/8/10

An Atlas Twitches?
In the wee early minutes New Years Eve I posted a little analysis of the Libya confessed/didn't confess issue that was mildly valuable but not too exciting. It was quickly picked up by Professor Robert Black at his much higher-profile blog. By the evening, an e-mail was sent from Frank Duggan of Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc. to Prof. Black, subject-titled "Gadhafi admitted it!" Weird spelling aside (and there just too many spellings), it's something interesting, being spurred by an e-mail Duggan had just recieved from the renowned Arnaud de Borchgrave, recounting the admission he personally took from Gaddafi years ago.

De Borchgrave is a Belgian-born, 1926-born, globe-trotting phenomenon, plying the realm between politics and journalism from the dawn of the Cold War until today. His greatest renown is his ability to speak to world leaders, discretely one would think, and help them understand each other. (I studied the guy for 30 minutes or so - Wiki). He was briefly President and CEO of United Press International, currently an Editor-at-Large for both UPI and The Washington Times, which he has written for since 1985 (not the best recommendation). He’d previously worked at numerous outlets, including Newsweek, reportedly fired "in part for keeping dossiers on fellow employees". But a Newsweek editor has said of his reporting “despite his intimacy with major policymakers, he has never aligned himself with either side of a dispute.” (see the wiki).

Aaaand, since 1991 de Borchgrave has been a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and its director of the Global Organized Crime Project, which became the Transnational Threats Project after 9/11, and also resides in groups like the Atlantic Council. (source). This in turn is dedicated to creating and using trans-Atlantic “consensus” on "appropriate responses" to "bring ideas to power" in service of “American leadership” of the world. Specifically they focus on refining policies towards Russia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, etc. as well as promoting NATO enlargement throughout Eurasia, and relevant here “drafting roadmaps for U.S. policy towards the Balkans, Africa, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.” (source).

It's not certain my little post spurred this twitch from a giant, but I was lancing at Libya’s non-admission admission, and this is about offering more solid proof on precisely that issue - "Gadhafi admitted it!" I’m curious enough to check the timeline:
My posting was at 12:25 am local (PST), which would be 8:25am GMT. I think that's when I started it, rather than hitting publish. But I'm not sure.
Professor Black partially re-posted it at 13:09 GMT. According to Black, de Borchgrave's line to Duggan was sent at 6.15pm GMT, and Duggan’s to Black at 7:21pm on New Year’s Eve. The Professor apparently had better things to do that evening, but not tooooo much better, and posted on it prompltly at 8:45 on New Year’s Day. I take two days for another overblown yammerfest in response. It's rather a coincidence if these developments aren't all connected. So I'm probably "touching history" I guess, a small bit of it, and so far it feels, well... not quite fuzzy.

Alright, Alright, so What the Hell is it?
The e-mail sent to Black, as he posted it, passes on of de Borchgrave's original message:

"As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya."

Up-front, it seems as if Duggan solicited this e-mail to support the admission he's heard about earlier. We can see three tracks worthy of note - Iranian genesis of the plot, which has been a confusing on-again, off-again sub-current in the case I need to study more. For the most part, an Iranian link (as the primary sponsors no less) played no role mentioned in renderings of "the official story" - for example, the final verdict (opinion of the Court) following the 2000 trial contains zero mentions of "Iran" in its 82 well-filled pages. There's also a potential problem for the Malta aspect of the official story (which I'll return to), and an acknowledgment that Libyan intel did agree to take some part in the (Iranian-initiated) bombing.

But the e-mail is too vague. Let's turn to the previous publication of this reported admission that likely spurred Duggan to ask for a statement. At the time of Megrahi’s release, in late August last year, de Borchgrave wrote for “The Atlanticist,” apparently a paper from Atlantis (kidding - from the Atlantic Council), on the interview he had with Gaddafi on June 6 1993. After the main session, de Borchgrave asked the leader “to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.” Gaddafi then “dismissed all the aides in his tent” and went candid, “in halting English without benefit of an interpreter.” Mostly he decried terrorism and offered to assist the West fight bin Laden-type terror networks (Libya is well known for realizing this threat specifically well before our 9/11, having suffered from them alongside U.S. sanctions, etc.).

Without offering an exact paraphrased quote, de Borchgrave states “Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus," Iran Air 655 - shot down in a bizarre reckless action by an unusual US warship suffering a strange group psychosis while on a U.S.-engineered entrapment mission. Gaddafi explained how the Arab world could not accept that as accident (and for decent reason) and how he agreed with the Iranians:

"[R]etaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). "Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?" said Gaddafi. "We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was," Gaddafi added."

I see no reason to either blindly trust or blindly doubt the veracity of this remembered talk. But taking it as true, we must still consider Gaddafi's understanding may be incomplete, or his statement may be slanted to fit an audience that's already convinced of his guilt. And then there are possible translation issues. But admittedly, it does sound like he agreed, or understood someone else's agreement, to take some part in a plan he knew would likely cause destruction of an American civil airliner. That would be a noteworthy development that might affect people's thinking on the subject. Libya is usually reported as "always inisisting on their innocence." Why did de Borchgrave wait sixteen years to report it? Did he?

No he didn't. Looks almost like he waited 11 years to make it public, while reporting it behind the scenes to the CIA, with a debriefing, immediately on returning home from the 1993 interview. He explained this in an article for NewsMax, from January 2004. Therein, de Borchgrave argued that Saddam Hussein's recent fall had increased Libya's anxiety to be even less for terrorism-tyranny-WMD-whatever. This led to Libya's 2003 moves to accept responsibility for Lockerbie (see first link at top), dismantle their WMD programs, and to really, really swear off terrorism, barring further frame-ups of course. To this end he had already come clean to the writer a decade before. He said of that meeting:

"[Gaddafi] admitted Libya's guilt for the downing of Pan Am 103, but made clear that it was originally an Iranian [plot] ... “So the Iranians subcontracted part of the job to a Syrian intelligence service, which, in turn, asked the Libyan Mukhabarat to handle part of the assignment," Col. Gadhafi explained. "That is the way these things were planned in those days. If we had initiated the plot, we would have made sure the accusing finger was pointed in the other direction and we would have picked Cyprus, not Malta, where some of the organization was done. The others picked Malta presumably to frame us.""

This to me is quite interesting. It would imply that someone not Libyan - it would seem Syrians - had directed al Megrahi to use Malta for the plot - or something, if Gaddafi's second-hand words are to be believed. Or alternately, the admission could read "we were involved in part of it, just not the part you "caught" our guy doing. The Syrians did the Malta stuff." That's not too helpful when your whole case against Libya was about the Libyan intel bigwig sent to Malta, by Tripoli, to plant the bomb because of his own (known) connections there and Libya's own, non-Iranian, grievances. Two JSO operatives, commanded by JSO higher-ups, had specifically targetted PA103 via Luqa airport, and were even stealing the "taggs" to write that on. No "framed" in that scenario. Is this just another Libyan non-admission admission?

And all this when the real evidence Gaddafi may or may not have known about highly suggests the bomb went on PA103 way up in London, with nothing physically to do with Malta at all. Don't lose focus.

A response by Peter Biddulph to Duggan's "admitted" e-mail got its own post on 2 January at Black's blog. Against the whole one-on-one admission, he stated from some experts that "Gaddafi never, repeat never, was without at least one armed personal bodyguard. To be alone with an American journalist with many contacts in Washington would be, for Gaddafi, impossible." de Borchgrave also claimed to be de-briefed by the CIA on this discussion in 1993:

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history." (NewsMax)

If history here means silence, then it was so. Biddulph points out this admission of guilt never made it into many if any pronouncements from, say Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA's Lockerbie probe until 1991, and could be someone privy to such a debriefing even after this. Biddulph found no reference to it in the trial proceedings, the writings of various commentators, etc., running through a pretty good listing of places this amazing admission did not get repeated between 1993 and 2009. Indeed, the earliest mention I've seen anywhere is that Newsmax piece from three years after the verdict.

Biddulph called the e-mail "disinformation," and postulated "the real reasons for this late announcement" as affecting the Libyan leadership succession (smearing Senoussi), and to distract from the imminent release of SCCRC documents." An original publication in 2004 does seem to complicate the second reason at least, and perhaps Mr. Biddulph spoke too soon, as I had dismissing de Borchgrave without knowing a flit about him. This alleged admission and the man who has alerted us to it are too much to dismiss. There are several somethings wrong about this story I can't quite put my finger on, and I suspect others more influential have their own problems with it, and so it's unlikely to make more noise now than it did before.
---

NUMBER ONE ON TOP: A SIGN FROM ON HIGH?

MST-13 COMPARATIVE GRAPHICS no. 4
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
January 1 2010 (last edit 1/2)

There's a plot device I must've seen once in a horror movie - a whole village, space station, whatever, was wiped out by something horrible, left desolate and stumbled on by a ragtag group of (4-7) likable misfits banded together by fate or conscription. Among the ruins they find one survivor - perhaps a young girl - who miraculously survived. The wandering Samaritans take her in of course as they moved on to whatever their new plan became. Up front I'm wondering, hey, just how did she survive? Only too late will they learn what I shouted twelve minutes in ... she IS the disguised monster that killed the (village, space station, etc) and then kills most (but not all) of the characters we had earlier bonded with through subtle cues.

Anyway, that feeling is similar to one I get about at least two of the crucial few bits of evidence against Libya, one being that timer fragment PT/35(b). In past readings and discussions I've run across some intriguing doubts about whether any such fragment would be expected to survive the semtex explosion required to bring down a plane. I know not the forensics, and am probably not going to. I do suspect the fragment was inserted into the evidence pool, but didn't want to say, as some did, that it must be a plant simply due to existing.

But its existence is odd, first of all in being found on land when it was fully capable of hiding itself in the deep ocean. Then its loneliness - parts of the radio itself were found, but nothing else from what was added. RARDE scientist Alan Feraday's final report noted "this piece of circuit board is the sole recovered fragment originating from the mechanism of the IED itself."

Now if the explosion were not strong enough to vaporize everything, I would expect a few surviving pieces, with this probably the largest. Rather it's the single and only. Luckily it was a piece of the highly-identifiable and highly-Libya-linked MST-13 circuit board that triggered the bomb, says the official papers. Discovered within a piece of exploded clothing, the fragment of fiberglass circuit board, about a millimeter thick, itself looks hardly exploded. Note its fracture lines, left, bottom, and lower right edges - are all straight lines at right angles to each other. I imagine there are reasonable explosion-related causes for this, but it strikes me as unnatural, FWIW.

Approximately one cm square (hugely magnified above), its printed surface is dominated by a touch pad that uncanilly resembles an upright number one, and double-underlined at that. Considering the entire board (below, right - color adjusted, touch pad area outlined), there is no other spot on the board that contains a recognizable symbol. There are plenty of spots with little lines that might be shown to match, but they don't seem to really say anything. When you're like Tom Thurman, searching with intrepid zeal for the one clue you need, that must be almost a religious experience to see... bam. THE ONE, telling its discoverers "There is but one way to conviction, and it is by me. I shall be thine number one evidence, and only savior." Subtly, it evokes the PA one-oh-three it was alleged to have brought down, and wispers in our left ear "we're number one" for solving this most awesome forensics puzzle and gettin the baddies.


Or less hyperbolically, when one sees this, the temptation is too much to turn it so that's visible. But in fact, the boxed MST-13 trial exhibit DP/111 (above left) shows the readout from the front (circuitry traced here for reference). We've been reading it upside down. Consider the other trial photo at right, with upside-down board, and the area of PT35(b) indicated in red, apparently on top and to the right. What a better place for an underlined number one could there be? Bottom sucks. Left, evil. Turn the whole world upside down if need be to make sure we're number one, double underlined, on the right and at the top. And can "prove" libya did it in the process. Who's writing this stuff? Random fate? Really? You aren't believing in God by now?

In addition to the fragment's clear and powerful message, we have its perhaps-miraculous existence. Previously I had wondered if maybe such a piece could have been shielded behind a larger element attached to the board before nestling in that shirt collar. But I knew it was a bit of a stretch. At left is a duplicate MST-13 with elements attached. The photo is from the website of a Mr. Byers, who claims the CIA was making these fake MST-13s in Florida. At any rate, I don't know what these things all do or are called I've even been told but it didn't sink in. Do note the largest block is the timer dispaly, seen here from the back, and set just south of middle. The rest is surely capacitors, flux inhibitionists, and some grommets around the outer parts.

Some of these things are probably made of metal and materials stronger and thicker than fiberglass board and could shield our PT/35(b) in the chaos of explosion. But if something like that happened, then where is that protector now? Did it vaporize itself? Or plunge irrecoverably into the mud at the bottom of a Scottish loch? Maybe, but then all elements of the bomb except this "number one" corner of that Mebo-traceable, indictment-enabling layout wind up disappearing into the ether? I'm a reasonable chap but I find that harder to swallow than what so many other clues are already saying - the rest was cut or blown off elsewhere, and only THE ONE was ever near this crime scene, after being carefully selected for the job. I can't see just why fate would have any interest in making sure the evidence "says something to us." A false God playing with reality and feeling immune in orbit might just take the chance.

ON LIBYA'S ADMISSION OF "RESPONSIBILITY"

AND MORE BBC MANIPULATIONS
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
December 31 2009

I recently started an interesting discussion thread at the JREF forum, fishing for thoughts on why people believe the official line on the Lockerbie bombing so fervently. I hadn't yet encountered any serious questions in the course of previous brilliant and provocative discussions - just a few drive-by statements supporting Megrahi's and Col. Gaddafy's absolute guilt, but never accompanied by evidence of any real knowledge. Among the questions and counter-points I suggested people could offer, if they knew anything, was "Libya admitted responsibility and paid out billions of dollars!" And if they had asked, I would answer like this:

There is no doubt that the Libyan government did issue a statement admitting responsibility, and agreed to pay compensation, among other measures, in 2003. It was an explicit pre-condition, inssted by Washington, to having broad UN sanctions lifted. Triploi has always defended its innocence of Lockerbie, but to function in the global economy, they had to do something. Here they managed to not explicitly break the rule, and using careful (cynical?) wordplay, managed to accept responsibility without admitting guilt. Sanctions were lifted.

There’s been much oxymoronic harping on this in the West as both an admission of guilt and an arrogant refusal to admit their guilt. The BBC’s 2008 Conspiracy Files episode on Lockerbie is a brilliant example. “For those that believe al Megrahi was framed,” snarls the narrator, Carolyn Katz, “one fact remains hard to explain away. Libya agreed to award substantial compensation for Lockerbie. Sanctions were then lifted.” Well, ignoring that they just answered their own stumper of a question, it’s a good question, and they continue: “Tripoli accepted responsibility for what it called “the Lockerbie incident.” But does it admit guilt?” Of course not, and by pretending there’s some disconnect, they’ve primed the audience to see the darkest of cynicism at work. Oops, how did that happen?

Under Prolonged Duress
Following he indictment of Libyan agents al Megrahi and Fhimah in late 1991, a process itself twisted with political machinations and riddled with a million broken questions marks, the Security Council moved to enforce the official truth with sanctions. Resolution 748 of 31 March 1992 imposed an arms and air embargo, diplomatic restrictions, and establishment of a sanctions committee. The committee’s work led to Resolution 883 of 11 November 1993, toughening sanctions. This measure “approved the freezing of Libyan funds and financial resources in other countries,” reports globalpolicy.org, “and banned the provision to Libya of equipment for oil refining and transportation.”

By late August 1998 the framework of a trial was established, and used as the measure of Resolution 1192, agreeing to suspend sanctions once the suspects were handed over to the special Scottish court in the Nehterlands at Camp Zeist. Tripoli made it happen, with help from luminaries like Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia and Nelson Mandela of Africa. Megrahi and Fhimah were flown on a special flight to the Netherlands in early April, and on the 5th were official arrested at Camp Zeist and set to await their trial. Sanctions were immediately suspended, under threat of re-enforcement (that never did materialize).

Many suspect this was never “supposed” to happen, as the evidence behind the indictment was too weak to stand up at Trial. The Crown's prosecutors managed to swing it somehow, but it took nearly two years from the handover, and a display of mental gymnastics worthy of the Realpolitik Olympics in the scale and skill of it. On January 31 2001, the three-judge panel made it official – Megrahi was legally guilty for the plot, and Fhimah was not guilty.

From there, many insisted sanctions should be lifted to reflect Libya’s good faith through this process. But Bush and Blair balked, demanding an admission of responsibility and compensation to victims’ families before they went past suspension. It was a letter, dated 15 August 2003, from Libya’s Permanent Representative to the President of the Council Ahmed A. Own, that paved the way. Own's letter explains “the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” as Libya calls itself, “has sought to cooperate in good faith throughout the past years” on solving the problems made theirs “resulting from the Lockerbie incident.” It was in this spirit that they “facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials.”

The letter also pledged Libya to cooperate with any further investigations, and to settle all compensation claims with haste, and to join the international “War on Terrorism.” It was widely (and reservedly) hailed as a bold… statement. But still evasive. It doesn’t clearly state anywhere the suspects or any Libyans were in any way actually guilty of the “incident.” Nonetheless, after a month of discussion in the Security Council, sanctions were lifted on Sept. 12 2003. France and the US insisted on abstaining, but it was otherwise a unanimous vote of 13. (source) The United States’ own sanctions would remain in full force due to the general evilness of col. Gaddafy, US officials made clear. (Additional normalizations did happen in 2007).

The Blood Libel Edits
Despite his portrayals as a crazed prophet of death, Moammar Gadaffi proved a shrewd and patient pragmatist in all this. He can't have ever believed his nation actually did the crime, but against "guilty" as a legal truth, he accepted they had no choice but to do “the time.” It’s a type of bind known to breed passive-aggressive tendencies. The Colonel’s son and likely successor Saif al Islam al Gaddafi seemed to understand it, when he was interviewed at home for the Conspiracy Files programme.

Q - Does Libya accept responsibility for the attack on Lockerbie?
A - Yes. We wrote a letter to the Security Council, saying that we are responsible for the acts of our employees, or people. But it doesn’t mean that we did it, in fact.
Q - So to be very clear on this, what you’re saying is that you accept responsibility, but you’re not admitting that you did it.
A - Of course.
(edit)
Q - That’s… to many people will sound like a very cynical way to conduct your relationship with the outside world.
A - What can you do? Without writing that letter, you will not be able to get out of the sanction.
Q - So this statement was just word play. It wasn’t an admission of guilt.
A - No. I admit that we play with the words. And we had to. We had to. There was no other… solution.

The BBC are masters, among others, of careful editing, and it helped bolster their whole “you don’t admit you’re guilty” thing where people have to explain there’s nothing to “admit” (or fail to explain that, as happened here). Thus he could, with a little imagination, appear to be saying “we don’t admit it, buuuuut of course we did it, you already know that.” Note the cut that removed some of his words from the middle of the exchange, unlikely to have been irrelevant. Thus is clearly established a cynical payout ($2.7 billion) and bit of semantics to buy up and slough off their non-admitted guilt so they could resume trade. They got away with Lockerbie using money and words and are laughing at us and making more money!

Immediately after “there was no other solution,” the video cuts right to the interviewer asking “so it was like blood money if you like,” which seems to be referring to what was just shown. But really it refers to the American victims' families, whose “money, money, money, money” attitude (well-known and spearheaded by Victims of PA103 Inc.) was “materialistic,” “greedy,” and amounted to “trading with the blood of their sons and daughters.” But with the magic of editing, it can seem to mean so much more!
---

LOCKERBIE QUOTES DUMP

These are the people you've been ignoring so far.


Please see the updated list at my new Lockerbie blog: No One Seriously Doubts the Libyan's Guilt?

KEEPING THE POLITICS OUT OF ARLINGTON

"THANK YOU, FRANK..."
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
December 24 2009

FRANK DUGGAN LEADS THE NEW BATTLE
In recent moths a loud new presence has dominated the U.S. government side of the Lockerbie discussion - Frank Duggan, current President of the board of “Victims of Pan Am 103, Inc.” (hereafter “the Corporation”). In an excellent article for The Scotsman, John Forsyth explains how long before his current headlining of the official “American Families Group,” Duggan’s connection started in August 1989 with his appointment, by President Bush, as "Liaison to the Families" on the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism. [1] [do please note his involvement did not start with losing anyone in the crash – he is not himself a victim of 103]. Duggan described this to Forsythe as "the Cadillac of commissions” due to “the quality of its work and the number of recommendations, some 60 of them if I recall." Its report, issued 15 May 1990, according to the Corporation’s website, “describ[ed] the lapses in security by Pan Am and the FAA and decried the lack of 'national will' to fight terrorism.” [2]

Mr Duggan maintained his contacts with the families over the years as the blame officially shifted to Libya, as leverage and negotiations led to the trial at Camp Zeist and a partial victory with Megrahi’s conviction. But only in 2008 did he become president of the Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc., which had in the years since proven a highly effective lobbying group, trading leverage for settlements from Pan Am and Libya, netting billions for survivors, lawyers, PR, board members, and so on. It doesn’t seem their shares were publicly traded, but Duggan told Forsyth:

"I could not say no to them. I told them I didn't think there was much more to do. Legally and politically the battle was over. Libya was recognized and compensation had been paid. Then they released Al Megrahi and a 20-year-old story was back on the front pages again." [3]

These developments needn’t have been a surprise to those who followed the news. In June 2007 the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission had announced Megrahi may have “suffered a miscarriage of justice” and should have his appeal heard. Duggan’s election/appointment was clearly after this omen, and perhaps (I don’t know the date) after the prisoner’s September 2008 diagnosis with advanced, terminal cancer. That would be two bad signs – “compassionate release” was known of at the time, as were prisoner transfer deals already being discussed. The increased publicity following the convict’s eventual release and inevitable “hero’s welcome” would, predictably, stimulate both anger and also attention to the case. With all this plus more evidence than ever available, 2008 was a year rife with threats to the official stasis – time to circle the wagons if ever there was one.

And Duggan is well equipped for verbal battle, tackling the growing ranks of official story critics as “Libya shills,” a “shameless band of conspiracy mavens,” and “no worse than Holocaust deniers who will not accept the facts before their faces”. [4] He told Forsyth he’s “through trying to reason with Prof Black or MSP Grahame," reasoning that seems to consist of repeating the most basic of decontextualized facts, straw man fallacies, and ad hominem attacks. [5] He also seems to suffer from a lack of sarcasm recognition. [6]

THE FRIAR'S STAND
Earnestness of the wrong kind however he's got a nose for, and used it in preparing for the 21st anniversary service, held Monday at Arlington National Cemetery. As in years past, the somber occasion was largely organized by the Victims’ Corporation, but this year’s ceremony happened under this new shadow of no one behind bars and newly loud questions upsetting the usual calm.

Shadows are cold places to be in December, as Friar Pat Keegans knew 21 years ago, and as he was just reminded. He was parish priest of Lockerbie at the time Flight 103 came down nearby. Through natural outreach following the disaster, he connected early with many of the victim’s families, becoming especially in-tune with Dr. Jim Swire, who has steadfastly denied the official Libyan villain storyline. Nonetheless, Duggan explains “in previous years, we have asked [Keegans] if he would like us to read a statement from him, as a number of US families are very fond of him.” [7]

These past submissions were presumably read to those gathered, and since he was invited back this year, I suspect any support for Megrahi’s innocence was muted if present at all, and tolerable with he safety of his conviction and imprisonment. But on the 21st anniversary, the divide of the Lockerbie Line was more pronounced, and Friar Keegans stated in part:

I want to say very clearly that I believe, irrespective of guilt or innocence, the release of Abdelbasset al-Megrahi on the grounds of compassion was the right decision. […] I hold that it was the right decision to make and it took great courage. The doubts concerning the conviction, the evidence and the reliability of witnesses have been well documented and led to an appeal.
...
I know that this is not the view generally held within the United States of America; however it a belief held by me and many others in Scotland who have been closely and personally involved since that dark day of December 21st 1988. I do believe that he is an innocent man and that in time the truth of that will emerge. But he was not released because of doubt concerning his conviction. He was released on strict legal grounds and because of the important element of Christian compassion which has influenced the legal systems of Scotland and Europe. [8]

It’s his feeling and opinion, tastefully stated without pushing it down any throats. Should the introduction of questions somehow lessen the importance of remembering the lost? Of course not – variant opinions should be embraced as part of the eternal search for truth these guys are always on about. But that‘s not really the issue, now, is it?

NOT A PLACE FOR POLITICS
The friar’s statement was pre- screened by Mr. Duggan and the Corporation, and it clearly rubbed them the wrong way. It may have been cast in a different tone than in previous years, or perhaps just the different circumstances had changed the standards. “We would have read his note this year,” Duggan explained in an e-mail to another journalist, “except that it was deemed by the Board, not by me, to be inappropriate for a memorial service.” [9] He made the distinction due to reports it was his own decision - in fact it would seem to be systemic to the Corporation. Doubts had no place in "a day to remember 270 innocent souls murdered in an act of state sponsored terrorism,” [10] so “Fr Keegans' note was sent out to the families on our mailing list rather than read at the cemetery on December 21st.” [11] So it's not outright censorship, but Keegans was denied a very tall soapbox for his "controversial" beliefs (another "Libya shill," and the world's getting crowded with them).

I don’t have the Corporation’s rules book in front of me, but from Duggan’s characterization, we have as reasons for the decision to nix Keegan's statement the following: “It is not a day for politics, a discussion of the bomber's trial and conviction or of his health." And “We try to avoid any political statements or any discussions of the convicted bomber." Friar Keegans’ remarks are “politics” in a real sense, using a platform to amplify his message of conscience. And political interpretations are not a good fit at the solemn parts, with the silence pierced by a ringing bell and the names of the victims. To penetrate that sanctified space with an upsetting statement of Megrahi’s innocence would be tasteless.

But of course no one ever suggested Keegans’ remarks would be said in that part of the ceremony. The other presenters did, as I had guessed they would, speak well past that hallowed point, into the anger or sense of justice or injustice emanating from the attack. Ignoring any hint of the false premise of the official story is tacitly accepting it as the de facto basis of all the post-remembrance activity. What was finally spoken was far worse than tacit acceptance, and in retrospect it’s just a bit clearer than before the ceremony that the dismissal of certain “political” views was nothing if not political in itself.

BRENNAN’S VERY TALL SOAPBOX
It would not take long to test these rules in action. President Obama sent John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, to represent the team at the cemetery. It’s not clear whether he had his comments pre-screened, or used any coercive force to demand his lopsided views got a prominent airing on the backs of others’ sorrow. Whatever the case, the results are a horrific breach of memorial protocol.

Thank you, Frank, for your introduction and for your stewardship of this incredible organization ... on behalf of President Obama, and on behalf of his administration, let me say this. The evidence was clear. The trial was fair. The guilt of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. His conviction stands. The sentence was just. And nothing—not his unjustified release and certainly not a deplorable scene on a tarmac in Tripoli—will ever change those facts or wash the guilt from his hands or from the hands of those who assisted him in carrying out this heinous crime.[12]

The mention of "those who assisted him" is of course highly political, aiming the cartoon narrative (with a 50% conviction rate so far) at Libya in general. The "unjustified" release, actually justified on established "compassionate grounds" by the prisoner's near-death state, is a verbotten reference (in the negative) to Megrahi's health issues and "controversial" release. In another jab at this issue, Brennan quipped

Indeed, for any who truly seek it, it is here, in Arlington, among this gathering of families and friends, where you will find “compassionate grounds.” And that is where your government will always be — here, with you and your families.

Wow, that doesn't sound manipulative in the slightest! Solemn and loving memorial with no political spin whatsoever! I suppose Mr. Duggan will announce his regret that the Administration chose his event to air its controversial views? Would that really be too much to ask since the mission here is accomplished anyways? It needn't be, and perhaps can't be, sincere even. To just flat ignore, or tacitly approve, this violation, would show some real temerity, audacity. gall, chuztpah, impudence, nerve, forvovenhed, طيش, تهور, unbesonnenheit, наглость, 蛮勇, and shameless brazen double-standarded effrontery and hypocrisy. On behalf of the Obama administration of course.
---

Sources:
[1, 3, 5] Forsyth, John. "After 21 years no end in sight to wrangles over Lockerbie." The Scotsman. 21 December 2009. http://news.scotsman.com/opinion/After-21-years-no-end.5926777.jp
[2]http://www.victimsofpanamflight103.org/node/8
[4] http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/12/lockerbie-doubters-branded-holocaust.html
[6] http://12-7-9-11.blogspot.com/2009/12/another-call-on-malta.html
[7] http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/12/compare-and-contrast.html
[8] http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/12/fr-keegans-remarks-are-not-being.html
[12] http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/12/arlington-address-by-john-o-brennan.html

IA 655 AND THE CESSATION OF THE IRAQ-IRAN WAR

[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
December 15 2009 update 1/6/10

Note 1/6/10: Too many small errors to fix. Don't cite this piece but do feel free to follow leads and double-check.
---
Tonkin Gulf and the DESOTO Precedent
For some indirect insight on Lockerbie, allow me to turn to two prior events – one decades past, the other bare months. The title of this post is inspired by Edwin E. Moïse’s book “Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.” (Chapel Hill /University of North Carolina Press. 1997. 255 pages). It was actually two Tonkin Gulf incidents, one overblown and the other complete fantasy, that enabled the widening of the conflict. These were sparked by a naval tactic called the “DESOTO patrol,” in which an unescorted destroyer specially equipped for communications surveillance, was sent as far as possible into the coastal waters of Communist Asia. The twin goals were to flaunt the enemy’s concept of territory while collecting intelligence for eventual hostile use. The missions were always marked by high tension. [Desoto patrols explained ]

Under Admiral Thomas H. Moorer’s guidance, such patrols were increased along the coast of North Vietnam in mid-1964, as US-engineered coastal raids (OPLAN 34-A) were also increased to put the DRV forces further on edge and stimulate “chatter” to analyze. The mission given to the USS Maddox in August has been described as “the delicate task of stimulating coastal defenses without provoking an attack,” a balance made harder by the added agitations. [1] The attack on the Maddox that was finally reported triggered a third and hidden (or unanticipated) power of the Desoto patrol – to start a war. And that crucial second attack didn’t even occur in reality - not for lack of trying.

The escalated Vietnam War of course went sour over the years, in the shadow of that initial dubious incident. It was the same type of patrol the USS Pueblo was on when disastrously captured by the North Koreans in early 1968, and a possibly similar mission that led to the USS Liberty incident the year before that. These plus lesser mishaps led to a decision in 1968 to stop such missions. The awkward U.S. loss of Saigon, plus Watergate and so on, changed the political calculus of manufactured crises. The “Remember the Maine” mentality just wasn’t going to work in the 1970s.

But the same notion of highly-portable naval sovereignty, with all the firepower to enforce it, continued - in, for example, the Persian Gulf in the latter 1980s.

Different Gulf, Different Decade, Different Moves
After Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, with tacit U.S. approval, Washington took Iraq’s side to ensure it didn’t lose in the bitter, grueling war that ensued. Towards this end, the U.S. re-flagged as its own supply and oil vessels coming to or going from Iraq - largely Kuwaiti oil tankers. This made them off-limits to Iran’s attempt at blockade. In Operation Earnest Will, U.S. Naval forces escorted them as well, enforcing its own blockades while denying Iran’s. Instances of Americans opening fire on Iranian forces and facilities rose steadily as well as the conflict dragged on; Operation Praying Mantis responded to Iranian mining with escalated U.S. attacks on Iranian gunboats, oil platforms, and tankers on April 18 1988. [2]

The covert US-Iraq alliance had intensified in latter 1987. Ironically, this was following the accidental Iraqi air attack on the USS Stark – with 37 sailors killed, it proved exactly to Iraq what the USS Liberty incident was to Israel, but in miniature; American cooperation increased. Advisers went to Baghdad full time, originally to prevent further such mishaps, “but the end result,” explained a 1992 Nightline report on America’s secret war, “was that the United States helped Iraq conduct long-range strikes against key Iranian targets, using U.S. ships as navigational aids. “We became,” as one senior U.S. officer told us, “forward air controllers for the Iraqi air force.”” [3]

Two conjoined decision of Late April 1988, following Operation Praying Mantis, set the stage for the IA655 incident: the expansion of shipping protection in the Gulf to all neutral vessels and the dispatch of the USS Vincennes to bolster the force backing it up. [4] The high-tech vessel (a Ticonderoga class AEGIS guided missile cruiser, introduced 1985 and also called "Roboship") was equipped for advanced surveillance of just about every frequency except, apparently, civilian air control traffic. Its combat speciality was surface to air engagements, a poor fit for the surface-surface work it was sent for. But the more aggressive attitude in the Gulf was well embodied by The Vincennes’ commanding officer, Captain William C. Rogers; according to those who worked behind him in the Gulf he was overly-aggressive, but then he may have been privy to certain unusual standards they weren’t.

The details of the incident are still new to this author and beyond the scope of this article, but the story of how the Vincennes came to do battle with Flight 655 seems highly dubious. Around 10:00 local time, the cruiser’s amazing receivers picked up two distress calls from neutral vessels under attack by Iranian vessels, and sent it heliopter to look, which in turn reported being fired on. According to information uncovered by ABC Nightline and Newsweek, one of these signals was later denied by the boat’s captain – he never came under attack nor asked for help. The other was from a completely non-existent “Liberian” vessel. [5]

Both signals were themselves forgeries - pure radio signal fakery as part of a U.S. plot to draw Iranian vessels out to join in the fake melee and become exposed to counter-attack by the Navy. Lt. Col. Roger Charles told Nightline the Navy thus “enticed, in fact, entrapped the Iranian gunboats into a situation where we could then say that there’s been a hostile action by them … And that then allowed — under this kind of specious rule of loosened hot pursuit — us to take military action.” [6] It was to the aid of these ghosts that Captain Rogers sped, like a duck hunter headed to where the decoys were laid, ready to pop any attackers lured out or any threat to his expensive ship.

The Incident and the American Message to Iran
Into this dangerous situation flew Iran Air Flight 655. An Airbus A300B2 with 290 passengers aboard (mostly Iranians, including 66 children), it departed from Bandar Abbas at 10:17 for its 28-minute flight to Bahrain Airport. It seems the plane was talking normally with ground control (in English), was well within an established civilian air corridor, climbing up rather than swooping down for an attack, and transmitting the right civilian transponder code that clearly means don’t shoot. [7]

But the Vincennes had the wrong equipment to hear the control chatter, and apparently the wrong crew for everything else. They misread the transponder signals as being from a MiG fighter jet. They misread its location as several miles outside the civilian corridor. They somehow missed the civil flight listing that would identify it by flight number. They may have failed to properly transmit their warning signals, as the “fighter” refused to turn away. These and other errors all happened at the same time in that dense fog-bank of war effect that only materializes under peculiar conditions like this, and quite often benefits the U.S. of A in no-longer-surprising ways.

So to summarize, on this poorly-run duck hunt, they decided that a fighter jet had been lured out as well as the gunboats - and that’s a bigger and more exotic prize. So with all the storm of mental short-circuits aside, it made perfect sense to fire two missiles at it. 290 non-combatant souls were snuffed out – some in the explosion that made the plane disintegrate, the rest after a three-mile fall to hit the Gulf’s warm waters. Video shows the ship’s crew elated to have hit the bad guy – they weren’t told until hours later what they’d really done, and apparently they didn’t figure it out in the meantime, even with the ship's data records to review.

One overriding message the United States government sent to Iran, aside from vague “regret” over this accident, can be seen in its public pronouncements. Consider the last sentence of President Reagan’s first statement of July 3: “The only U.S. interest in the Persian Gulf is peace, and this tragedy reinforces the need to achieve that goal with all possible speed.” [8] It sounds nicely utopian, but it surely wasn’t meant that way. White House media handler Marlin Fitzwater made the message a little more explicitly a week later:

Only an end to the war, an objective we desire, can halt the immense suffering in the region and put an end to innocent loss of life. Our goal is peace in the Gulf and on land. We urge Iran and Iraq to work with the Security Council for an urgent comprehensive settlement of the war pursuant to Resolution 598. Meanwhile, United States forces will continue their mission in the area, keenly aware of the risks involved and ready to face them. [9]

That is, as the Iranians likely read it, wey’ll keep on shooting at anything that might possibly be a threat as long as we “have to” hang around there, which is until Iran surrenders. Charles Price, US Ambassador to UK later said “this incident wouldn’t have happened if Iran wasn’t, and hadn’t been in the process now for a long time, of attacking U.S. and other shipping in the Gulf.” [10] This is certainly a contributing factor, along with the U.S. decision to fake some of these attacks electronically and lure hem into a fight, the decision to equip, staff, and deploy the Vincennes in such a way that it became deadly to civil airliners, etc. For that matter it wouldn’t happen if the airplane had never been invented. So many variables and alternate outcomes riddle this case, that Price picked on Iran’s small role, played with such limited options, shows the issue at hand – their options were narrower yet and they’d better stop shooting altogether.

Iran Surrenders / A Leaf on the Wind
Since Iraq started the war in 1980, its course had been a grueling back and forth, with steady but modest Iranian gains into Iraqi territory by the end of 1987. UN Security Council Resolution 598 had called for a return to pre-war boundaries, making Iran reluctant to agree, even as the pain deepened. Then Iraq started another push-back in early 1988: long-range bombardment increased, and American assistance got more hands-on as well, as we’ve seen. The balance might have shifted back yet again but for what happened in July.

The shooting down of IA655 undoubtedly contributed to hastening Iran’s effective surrender. However, the precise role it played – minor, major, or peripheral, is difficult to know. Adding to new anxieties, just days after the incident, Iraqi forces “dropped chemical cyanide bombs” on the Kurdish village of Zardan on the Iranian side. Again hundreds were killed and “the enraged Iranians considered a huge rearming and nuclear weapons, but decided that this was beyond their means” by that time. [11] So July was a bad month for Iran - on top of the cumulative effects of years of similar woe, the loss of the Airbus to Americans in particular put a deeper fear than ever across the Persian mind. As an Iranian scholar stated at a conference hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center (paraphrased)

“[A] turning point in Iran's thinking came with the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in July 1988 by the American cruiser USS Vincennes. That incident apparently led Ayatollah Khomeini to conclude that Iran could not risk the possibility of U.S. open combat operations against Iran and he decided it was time to end the conflict." [12]

There’s every reason to believe that’s just what the Americans wanted to get across, after the tragedy if not shortly before as well. This author is not eager to conclude there was any design to kill hundreds of innocents – but there are some very hard questions to address at another date.

The fighting did continue but Iran’s mindset was definitely shifting and quickly – hostilities officially and physically ended just six weeks after the Vincennes incident, on August 20. Iranian organized revenge meeting were already taking place by then, and their selected contractor groups were making their airliner radio bombs by the time the “Autumn Leaves” were shaken loose in Germany in October. It seems all too likely one of these Iranian grown leaves drifted right across the English Channel and lighted itself in the belly of PA103 on 21 December, less than six months after Captain Rogers’ duck hunt. A half hour after takeoff, it exacted an exact revenge, leaving 259 to deal with five miles of pure gravity however they did before dying against the cold winter soil of Scotland.

That, or the Iranians just gave up after the Germany bust, and the Libyans took their own incidental revenge for something else at just that time, as the FBI, CIA, USG, Scottish Police, Camp Zeist judges, and others claim to believe.

---
Sources:
[1] Rust, William. "The "phantom battle" that led to war; can it happen again?" US News and World Report. July 23, 1984. Posted online December 3 2005. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051203/3phantombattle.htm
[2]Operation Praying Mantis. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis
[3, 5, 6] "The USS Vincennes: Public War, Secret War" ABC Nightline, Aired July 1 1992. Full Transcript, with extensive notes.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-nightline-19920701.html
[4] Kelley, Stephen Andrew. Better Lucky Than Good: Operation Earnest Will as Gunboat Diplomacy. (Naval Postgraduate School. June 2007. PDF link:
http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA470423
[7, 8, 9] Ghasemi, Shapour. “Shooting Down Iran Air 655 [IA655]” Iran Chamber Society: History of Iran. 2004. http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/shootingdown_iranair_flight655.php
[10] The Maltese Double Cross - 32:00 mark
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War
[12] http://wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.print&news_id=90411&stoplayout=true

ANOTHER CALL ON MALTA

ADMIT IT ALREADY!
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
December 11 2009

Note: The Following does not necessarily reflect the author's true views in all regards

The Status Quo
Two previous posts explained al Megrahi’s Malta-based plot to destroy Pan Am 103. First we witnessed the keen memory and staunch bravery of eyewitness Anthony Gauci, standing alone against an uncaring island subdued by Libyan barbarians. Next I chronicled the complete subjugation of Air Malta and its security operations at Luqa Airport, allowing the PA103 bomb to hurtle uncontrollably to Lockerbie. And finally, at the end of the second piece, I just started hinting at their infuriating denials after the fact that any such plot ever did pierce their magical force field.

It’s noteworthy that Air Malta has avoided the notoriety and bankruptcy that sunk Pan Am following this disaster. How, when their initial “failure” is what gave Pan Am its chance to fail as well? As usual in a world rife with anti-American plots, the true villain escapes unharmed, allowed to live and thrive, while the innocent passerby is shot to death. The distatsteful status quo is thus the Americans got their (little fish) bad guy, but lost a major airline, while the Libyans have paid up and admitted responsibility, while cynically denying responsibility, and all Malta had to do was keep quiet on its part. It’s a more than fair deal for the government in Velletta, and one should think they’d be grateful. And normally they act that way.

Demands of the Disgruntled
Some have agitated to upset that stasis, but so far the calls on Malta are quite one-sided, encouraging them to “clear their name” of the Lockerbie taint altogether. These pleas usually come from a small, well-known group of people who would like to de-blame Libya itself. Now if that doesn’t illustrate the axis of malice between Velletta and Triploi, nothing does.

Just in the last couple of months, Lockerbie trial “architect” and general grumpy gus Professor Robert Black piped up in late August. He opined “the Maltese government should be pressing very hard within the EU for an enquiry into Lockerbie,” and criticized the Scottish judges for accepting that Megrahi’s bag from Malta ever existed.

On 25 October that one UN guy, Köchler, that was at the trial and said some bad stuff about it, called for a Maltese probe of Gauci in particular: "If they are committed to the rule of law, the Maltese authorities should open their own investigation and interrogate Mr Gauci," One must wonder how much Gaddaffy is paying Herr Köchler to get at the hero of Silema like the lurking Libyans never were able to?

Never Enough Proof
The Maltese authorities have really done a great job “clearing their name” without the encouragement, but with it they went haywire. On 31 October the UK Daily Telegraph reported “Malta to investigate evidence of key Lockerbie witness.” This was based on an unnamed “Maltese legal official” who said “Tony Gauci is an area where we have to investigate more thoroughly and we are preparing for this. There was never enough proof, to be frank, on the circumstances of his evidence and there is pressure coming from many quarters on Malta to move to resolve the issue." There’s not enough proof in the world, apparently.

The following day, 1 November, the Justice Department specifically denied such preparations, disowning any comment that may have been made. However, their press release took the chance to repeat the infuriating claim that since 1988, the Maltese government has "always maintained the bomb which downed Pan Am flight 103 had not departed from Malta and ample proof of this was produced.” Oh, so now the mountain of proof of a Maltese-origin bomb, that’s “never enough,” is trumped by that tired old paperwork? It becomes clearer.

To top off this cowardly dodge, on the same day, Prime Mnister Gonzi affirmed their disinterest in Gauci. “Over the years we cooperated with every investigation,” he explained, which is technically true. But like the others, he ignores the terrorist plots hatched there that were uncovered by these efforts. “Our position,” he pronounced, “was always that Malta had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.” Well they did host the whole thing except the explosion, so presumably he means nothingconsciously to do with it. But this too is in doubt. When asked if his decision not to re-question Gauci was due to pressure from the U.S., Gonzi replied “it is totally untrue.” Indeed, their own embarrassment seems more at stake than America’s in again contrasting Tony’s sharp eye with the complacent approach everyone else in Malta takes towards the Libyans.

I’d like to quote Stuart Henderson, that proper Scottish copper who led the whole police investigation of Lockerbie. He wasn’t specifically referring to any of the Maltese vomiting this vile venom above when he spoke about Megrahi's release in August. But those who doubt the official story, as most Maltese seem to, “make my blood boil” and are “an insult to our police officers … an insult to the Americans, to the Germans, to the Swiss and the Maltese officers.” That’s right, you guys are slandering your own who helped prove just exactly how the Libyans killed 270 with a bomb your lame-ass airport just “missed” and somehow you can’t just admit it.

Another Call and Surely Not the Last
But it didn’t end there, as proved by a 29 November letter, urging Malta to “defend itself,” issued by the Orwellianly-named “Justice for Megrahi campaign.” The letter was signed by, among others, British MPs Tom Dalyell and Teddy Taylor, plus Noam Chomsky - all outspoken Leftist weirdos who argue that Megrahi is an innocent little lamb framed by “the West” (i.e. – the New World Order, aka “Illuminati”). Professor Chomsky, not surprisingly, called the proper conviction based on proof of a terrorist mass murderer "a remarkable illustration of the conformism and obedience of intellectual opinion in the West". Oh, Chomsky… yawn-skip-yawn-skip-yawn-skip… "I think the trial was very seriously flawed,” he further opined to the Times of Malta, “including crucially the alleged role of Malta. There is every reason to call for a very serious independent inquiry." Certainly Triploi has the roster for it drafted already, and a few more bought souls from now we might see Justice turned on its head, to Chomsky’s delight.

And finally to quote again then Minister of Home Affairs, Tonio Borg, quite a while back in early 2000: "We have no proof that these two Libyan suspects were involved in anything illegal in Malta regarding this case, particularly the placing of this bomb on Air Malta Flight ... 180.” I had hoped he would be fired since then, especially after the trial at camp Zeist shortly put the lie to such claims. Rather, he’s prospered just like Air Malta; since then he’s been Minister of Foreign Affairs and of Justice (ironically), and is currently honored with the titles Deputy Leader of the Nationalist Party, leader of the House of Representatives, and Deputy Prime Minister. Would Germany have been tolerated promoting its holocaust deniers like this?

The Final Call: Pull Malta Back From the Dark Side
Clearly this talk of a UN inquiry, under Libyan control, torturing Tony Gauci into recanting his story, and all the rest, has got to stop. That is hardly worth mentioning outright it's so elemental. But while we’re at it, we must ask if this tiny, easily manipulated island nation was really just used by the Libyans against its will? Or have they been swayed to the dark side all along? The petitioners seem to bet on the latter.

Historically, the Maltese are notoriously soft on Islam, and perhaps by now sympathetic to the anti-American Jihad. At the very least they’re likely to slide that way if Libya’s evil grip is allowed to continue unaddressed. Therefore, let’s make it more explicit and issue a new international call on Malta to “Admit it! You're Tripoli's little pet and happy about it!” Sign the informal petition by leaving a comment below. We are all Americans now, worldwide, and we will get our perps, be they Libyan, Maltese, and also otherwise. The case is open!

I specifically speak to Brits – Scots, Welsh, English, Etc. It must be asked if all this was caused by the UK letting go of the island’s hand in this world crowded with evil. Recall that after you freed Malta from the Freemason French, you cared for them and left your names all over, until you set them loose in the hippie 1960’s. But as usual permissiveness breeds wickedness and by 1988, planes were falling on the UK itself due to losing Malta. If those people can’t behave responsibly and face up to the consequences of their long dance with Libya, perhaps independence should be seriously re-considered.
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WHILE MALTA SLEPT?

HOW MALTA LET LOCKERBIE HAPPEN
[Pan Am 103 Series]
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
December 9 2009

Note: The Following does not necessarily reflect the author's true views in all regards

A previous post addressed the fateful clothes purchase by Lockerbie bomber al Megrahi on the island of Malta, well-known as occurring on December 7 1988 at the Gauci family’s shop Mary’s House. But this is only a sliver of the terrorist mastermind’s larger plot with many steps taken all within a few square miles around Silema, under the watchless eye of the Maltese authorities - especially at nearby Luqa airport where the main action went down.

Abdelbaset al Megrahi was a Libyan intelligence bigwig personally carrying out some hair-brained revenge by Col Gaddaffy for a two-year old US bombing of Libya that had killed his adopted daughter. Megrahi had connections at Luqa airport via his own Libyan Arab Airlines links, but the experts agree he could not likely do this all alone without at least one accomplice inside the airport. His exactly one (known) accomplice, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, also worked for LAA at Luqa and was a Libyan intelligence operative, high-level.

Of course Fhimah was later found not guilty on a technicality, that being the evidence against him, and the other incredible details flowing from star witness Abdulmajid Giaka, was found “inadmissible” by the three presiding judges. This was one of their more cautious and wimpy moves – a key witness ignored over a few piddling doubts raised by the defense about his meager repayments and the doubts of some memo-writer.

To be clear on this point, the prosecution and the CIA (who first worked the witness) have always known Mr, Giaka was honest and credible, with high-level connections at Luqa and in Libyan intelligence, and a knowledge both vast and intimate of the Megrahi-Fhimah plot. The judges didn’t specifically counter this, and any disinterested observer can note his story is still effectively true, as it mirrored the prosecution case. For the prime example, Giaka swears he saw both accused arrive at the airport with a mysterious brown Samsonite suitcase. That’s dynamite info, and all the other evidence proves they did exactly this. That his story so closely resembles that truth can hardly be coincidence, and his dismissal is but a technicality.

Giaka also alerted his handlers of genuine clues that panned out, like Fhimah’s diary entry noting he needed to get “TAGGS” (in English but misspelled). What business would an airline employee have with luggage tags besides planning to use one of them (with a few spares to practice on) to get a bomb onto PA103? It’s been suggested the diary explains he was taking sample tags to a local printer to get more made, but the question that begs an answer then is why write something this boring in your diary when you could jot down clues to your terrorist plot? In English? The critics cannot answer that.

Within that brown suitcase Giaka saw, we know Megrahi had the bomb, ready made with a flexible Mebo timer the Libyans were famous for having by then, packed into a radio with the memorable clothes and umbrella he didn’t need anymore. Fully confident in his ability to walk right through Luqa airport, he decided to send this bundle of malice right from there, correctly presuming gross negligence would repeatedly fail to stop it on its complex chosen path. It was perhaps the sheer arrogance of those “above the law” that made Megrahi time the bomb to just deny the ocean’s anonymity, and leave these scattered clues to be found on land and traced back to Mebo and Gauci and himself. It all makes sense in hindsight, and fits established and understood patterns of criminal behavior. For example, the professionals who write up James Bond villains know just this type all too well and should not be surprised at such mundane contrivances.

As to how this perfectly predictable plot continued on to fruition unopposed, that’s more troubling. All it took to penetrate “Mary’s House” and buy just the right clothes was a little money. It was Luqa Airport that really mattered, and that too proved easy enough for a determined mastermind to part like the Red Sea. The airline Air Malta ran security there, essentially the host airline. Air Malta security director Wilfred Borg has been quite defensive, always speaking up about their “stringent policies” of double-checking the number of bags, and reconciling each with the right passengers. They have produced the documentation for investigators and news cameras alike, to “prove” their case. But paper is just so darn thin as evidence when clearly a bag with a bomb DID come out of Malta.

Unaccompanied bags are not allowed, so couldn’t happen, the logic ran. Strangely, the Matlese police agreed as if they know anything about airports. Outside “experts” like Denis Phipps, former security director for British Airways, have found these records “reliable,” and as showing 55 pieces of luggage, all claimed by 39 passengers, with none unaccompanied. The answer, presuming for argument’s sake these are legitimate records, is that the 56th bag was simply not documented. Why would a terrorist be so stupid and arrogant as to allow his bomb bag to de recorded on the official paperwork to be traced back?

KM180 landed in Frankfurt at mid-day, and it was there the suitcase wormed its way onto PA103, using…. Yep, that “TAGG.” These magical tickets were the perfect tool; in the 1980s, airports routinely searched only bags without tags. One with proper tags was considered “good to go” and sent along. The proof it was sent along was provided by the diligent German Federal Police, BKA, who had sprung into action within days of the crash. It was widely reported in Germany that Flight 103 originated in Frankfurt, which it only sort-of did. So it’s understandable they would visit the airport, as they did on or around Christmas at the latest, looking for the luggage records, computer files and paper forms, relating to 103 and what went on it.

Now it’s no secret that police can goof things up and usually do. They forgot to get the records for what went onto Flight 103 when they were there, and the airport deleted that data a few days later with no official backup or paper copies kept. Luckily, a souvenir printout that an upright employee handed to the BKA in late January proved that an unaccompanied bag was routed from KM180 onto the ‘first leg’ of Flight 103. The BKA investigated the airport again and agreed, six months later alerting Scottish police. And that, good people, is solid proof of an unaccompanied bag from Malta, no matter what the Maltese and their apologists claim.

Few have the guts to openly verbalize the presumption one must make on considering all this. One exception is Vincent Cannistraro, head of the CIA’s Lockerbie investigation, who had been tenaciously telling the truth about Libya for years already before working with Giaka to ‘simulate’ it. In a 1994 documentary (Frontline Scotland: Silence over Lockerbie), Cannistraro told the truth about their northern island possession, masterfully dismissing the claims of Air Malta and their ilk:

“They have vindicated themselves on paper in terms of the security procedures, but if their security personnel are suborned by hostile intelligence service, and they are completely vulnerable to whatever that hostile service would want to put on their aircraft, with baggage tags, without baggage tags. Once you have basically infiltrated the security apparatus there is no barrier to doing exactly what Fhimah and Megrahi DID." (emph. Mine)

They aren't saying it aloud like this, these days, but that MUST still be the official story stood by in Washington and London. Malta was suborned into letting Lockerbie happen and have at least tacitly helped confuse this basic fact. Consider this outrageous claim by Malta's Minister of Home Affairs, Tonio Borg (any relation to the compromised Wilfred Borg, hmmm?): "We have no proof that these two Libyan suspects were involved in anything illegal in Malta regarding this case, particularly the placing of this bomb on Air Malta Flight ... 180.” The suspicious security breach, which they could just admit to but disown as a mistake, was now to be compounded with an equally dubious refusal to admit their … failure? It’s seeming less and less like a failure and Borg is sounding sort of like a German railroadman denying his part in the Holocaust.

Disingenuous and disgusting. I hope he's been fired or at least demoted since then.

To be continued...