The jury is still out on this decision.

How Libya Was Framed
for the Lockerbie
Bombing
By Alexander Cockburn
T
here were howls of fury when
the Scottish justice minister re-
leased from his Scottish prison
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan
Arab Airlines official convicted of
planting the bomb on board Pan Am
Flight 103 that killed 281 people on the
plane and in the village of Lockerbie on
December 21, 1988. Megrahi's colleague,
Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted
of charges in the terrorist attack. Across
Limbaugh-land vitriol was sprayed in the
general direction of both Scotland and
Libya. FBI Director Robert Mueller, who
in 1991 was assistant attorney general in
charge of the investigation of al-Megrahi,
wrote that he was "outraged at the deci-
sion, blithely defended on the grounds of
'compassion.'" (Megrahi is suffering from
terminal prostate cancer.)The Scottish
government hit back, saying that while
"compassionate release" might not be
part of the U.S. justice system, it was a
proper part of Scotland's.
Actually, the "compassionate" release
may have been prompted by rather more
mercenary or self-interested calculations.
There have been allegations in the U.K.
of Megrahi's release being part of a larger
British deal with Libya involving trade
agreements and arms sales. It is certain
that the release aborted Megrahi's appeal,
which would have thrown a lurid and un-
flattering light on the kangaroo trial in
2000. This was a particularly dark day for
the reputation of Scottish justice since it
showed clearly that the Scottish bench
clicked its heels to commands from
Westminster that no matter how thread-
bare the case against Megrahi was, he
had to be convicted. But now the thou-
sands of pages of Mehrahi's appeal go
into the trash bin and Megrahi will, in the
complacent words of a Scottish govern-
ment spokesman, "die a convicted man."
There's a famous passage in Memorials
of His Time, my great-great grandfa-
ther, Lord Cockburn's memoirs, where
the renowned Scotch judge and leading
Whig stigmatizes some of his Tory pre-
decessors on the bench, including the
terrible Lord Braxfield, who presided
over what Cockburn called "the indel-
ible iniquity" of the sedition trials of
1793 and 1794. "Let them bring me pris-
oners, and I'll find them law," Cockburn
quotes Braxfield as saying privately, also
whispering from the bench to a juror he
knew, "Come awa, Maister Horner, come
awa, and help us to hang ane o' thae da-
amned scoondrels."
Braxfield most certainly has his politi-
cal disciples on the Scottish bench in the
Lockerbie trial in 2000, in the persons
of the three judges who traveled to the
Netherlands to preside over the trial of
the two Libyans charged with planting
the device that prompted the crash of
Pan Am Flight 103. In a trenchant early
criticism of the verdict, Hans Koechler, a
distinguished Austrian philosopher ap-
pointed as one of five international ob-
servers at the trial in Zeist, Holland, by
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, is-
sued a well-merited denunciation of the
judges' bizarre conclusion. "In my opin-
ion," Koechler said, "there seemed to be
considerable political influence on the
judges and the verdict."
Koechler pointed out that the judges
found Megrahi guilty even though they
themselves admitted that his identifi-
cation by a Maltese shop owner (sum-
moned by the prosecution to testify that
Megrahi bought clothes, later deemed to
have been packed in the lethal suitcase
bomb) was "not absolute" and that there
was a "mass of conflicting evidence."
Furthermore, Koechler queried the
active involvement of senior U.S. Justice
Department officials as part of the Scotch a similar vein, the Harvard researcher
Byron Good writes, "Where such ill-
ness is considered inevitably chronic,
an essential part of the self that cannot
be altered … the illness is more likely to
be chronic." By contrast, as a prodigious
amount of ethnographic literature has
shown, mental illness is far less func-
tionally debilitating in societies where it
is understood as ephemeral rather than
congenital, and invested with philosophi-
cal meaning through rich cultural idioms
like spirit possession and trance.
Such findings throw into serious doubt
the Hippocratic alibis of the drug barons
and their proxies. It is not my intent to
either romanticize the world's have-nots
or impugn the philanthropic impulse of
doctors who, forced to make therapeu-
tic decisions in severely constrained cir-
cumstances, may have no choice but to
salve their patients' psychic wounds with
chemical prostheses and make diagno-
ses that they themselves find suspect. It
is, however, incumbent upon us to ask
whose interests are served when unruly
citizenries are chemically pacified, par-
ticularly in a global polity marked by
such ruthless asymmetries of wealth and
health. Like any other industry, the psy-
chopharmaceutical sector is profit-based
and cannot be expected to promote
views of illness that are unfavorable to
their economic interests; indeed, they are
obliged to actively discredit such views.
Meeting Wall Street growth expectations
has become an increasingly daunting task
as pharmaceuticals companies' patents
on their blockbuster molecules sequen-
tially expire, opening the international
market to a flood of generics. In order
to keep pace with investors' hopes, the
multinationals must usher three to five
new compounds into domestic markets
per year, or, as we have seen, compensate
for fiscal shortfalls by growing markets
abroad. If an unintended outcome of
this strategy is the excision of historical
depth and geographic breadth from local
understandings of oppression, that is just
a happy coincidence for ruling elites. CP
in the suitcase that contained the bomb,
had been bought by the accused Megrahi
from a shop in Malta; and (c) that a "se-
cret witness," Abdulmajid Gialka, a for-
mer colleague of the accused pair in the
Libyan Airlines office in Malta, would
testify that he had observed them either
constructing the bomb or at least seen
them loading on the plane in Frankfurt.
The prosecution was unable to pro-
duce evidence to substantiate any of
these points or to encourage any confi-
dence in Gialka's reliability as a witness.
The Swiss manufacturer of the timer,
Edwin Bollier, testified he had sold timers
of a similar type to the East Germans and
conceded, under cross-examination by
defense lawyers, that he had connections
to many intelligence agencies, including
not only the Libyans but also the CIA.
By the time of the trial, Gialka had
been living under witness protection
in the U.S.A. He had received $320,000
from his American hosts and, in the
event of conviction of the accused, stood
to collect up to $4 million in reward
money. He had CIA connections, so the
defense lawyers learned, before 1988.
The prosecution's case absolutely de-
pended on proving beyond a reasonable
doubt that Megrahi was the man who
bought the clothes, traced by police to a
Maltese clothes shop. In nineteen sepa-
rate statements to police prior to the
trial the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, had
failed to make a positive identification of
Megrahi. In the witness box, Gauci was
asked five times if he recognized anyone
in the courtroom. No answer. Finally, the
exasperated prosecutor pointed to the
dock and asked if the man sitting on the
left was the customer in question. Even
so, the best that Gauci could do was to
mumble that "he resembles him."
Gauci had also told the police that the
man who bought the clothes was 6 feet
tall and over 50 years of age. Megrahi is
5 feet 8 inches tall, and in late 1988 he
was 36. The clothes were bought either
on November 23 or December 7, 1988.

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September 1-15, 2009    Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair vol. 16, no. 15