Oh East is East and West is West
And never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
At God’s great Judgment Seat.
Kipling The
Ballad of East and West
And the end
of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear : “a Fool lies
here
Who tried to hustle the East”.
[Quoted
by John Le Carre (David J.M. Cornwall) on a BBC television interview,
with reference to the invasion of Iraq. The famous spy story writer
had no illusions about the consequences of that illegal act of war to
obtain control of the second-largest source of petroleum in the world.]
Kipling
Naulahka
I doubt if Rudyard Kipling
had much direct experience of the Arab world, but certainly the culture of
the Orient and its people is well expressed in his ballads, two of which
are quoted from above. I have always enjoyed Kipling, and never found him
to be the poet of imperialism as some describe him, though they probably
studied his life and works more deeply than I. He described the empire
period but also challenged much of the empire attitude. He spent much of
his early years in what is now Pakistan where he was born in Lahore,
though his initial education was in England. He later traveled around the
sub-continent, but spent little time in the Middle East or Africa, -
regions he was to write about with eloquence and insight. Kipling spent
more time in Burma, China, Japan and the USA, than he did in Arabia or
Africa.
The Middle East
A soldier of the British
Empire who served in the Middle East and North Africa whose exploits I
enjoyed reading was General C.G. Gordon of Khartoum. He was only 52 when
killed by the army of the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmed. I knew one of his
descendants, a Gioia Gordon, resident in Italy, and there is a house I
used to visit in our home town that had connections with his family, but
precisely what they were I could not ascertain.
General Charles G. Gordon
of Khartoum fame. He explored much around Yemen and Palestine,
discovering “Gordon’s Calvary”, the skull rock and the garden tomb in
Jerusalem. He also discovered the massive rock-hewn water reservoirs in
Aden, Yemen.
The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayam has long been a a favourite poem of mine. How much Edward
Fitzgerald’s translation really expresses the Persian philosopher’s ideas
has been a matter of debate, but no other translation of the Rubaiyat
inspires me like his. It reads in parts like Ecclesiastes, the
profound wisdom book of the aged King Solomon. My own radical instincts,
and my life-long frustration from seeking to rectify or improve matters in
situations where the basic structures were very imperfect, find an
eloquent echo in the verse :
“Ah love, couldst thou
and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, - and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire”
|
Ancient Mesopotamia
The ancient land between the two rivers has a
cultural heritage that goes back thousands of years. In the fragile
remains of a pioneer of human civilisation in the "Fertile Crescent".
Contemporary with Egyptian civilisation, probably even earlier, there
sprang up in Western Asia, in the river valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates, the region which came to be called Mesopotamia ("between
the rivers" in Greek). It was peopled by the Sumerians. Both
countries, Egypt and Mesopotamia, had ideal conditions for
development: adequate water resources, food and building materials.
Both learned how to control water with dikes, distribute it through
irrigation ditches, reap abundant harvests, and raise cattle, sheep
and goats. Each knew the hoe and the plough. But in Nippur on the
Euphrates, donkeys pulled wheeled carts and chariots -- a device that
was invented there. There, too, cuneiform writing was developed,
inscribed on an almost imperishable pottery tablet. There is evidence
of a city community in Mesopotamia even as early as 6000 BC, and the
first accounting methods can be traced to the ancient city of
Babylon. The Sumerian city-states continually warred against one
another. Soldiers used spears and shields and fought in close
formation. In every city officials and priests formed the aristocracy
and free landowners the middle class, while slaves were at the lower
end of the social strata. The Sumerians built a great tower to their
chief god Enil at the ancient city of Nippur. Other towns did the same
thing, and the tower of Babylon may well have been based on the one
referred to in the Genesis story of the tower of Babel. The Sumerian
empire was founded by the high priest of the god of the city of Erech
and extended -- according to an inscription at Nippur -- "from the
upper to the lower sea". That is to say, from the Persian Gulf, west
to the Mediterranean or the Red Sea.
These ancestors of the Iraqis ruled a powerful
state, which came to an end in 2750 BC when a tribe, the Akkadians who
lived in the desert adjoining Sumer, conquered it. Sargon I's
Sumerian-Akkadian empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the
Mediterranean and endured for another two hundred years. As the
kingdom declined, other tribes appeared. The Elamites conquered some
of the southern cities, while the Amorites settled in the north and,
about 2200 BC, established themselves in the as yet small village of
Babylon. There the state built by the great king Hammurabi reached its
peak from about 2100 BC. The city of Babylon (which has perished
completely), surrounded by its famous walls, developed under his rule.
Even more famous were the Hanging Gardens, one of the Wonders of the
Ancient World. With his eye upon every corner of the land, the great
and powerful Hammurabi saw how necessary it was to bring into
uniformity all the various and sometimes conflicting laws and business
customs of the land. He therefore collected them, arranged them
systematically, added new and improved laws, and issued his celebrated
code for the management of his empire. It was engraved on a piece of
stone more than two metres high, at the top of which is a sculptured
scene representing Hammurabi receiving the law from the sun-god.
The code, one of the earliest of ancient law, which
was set up in the temple of the great god Marduk in Babylon, survived.
Copies of it were written on clay tablets and used by the local
courts. The law stipulated justice to the widow, the orphan, and the
poor. Marriage required a legal agreement between man and wife, and
the position of women in the early Babylonian world was a high one.
They engaged in business on their own account, and were even
professional scribes. Especially prominent in the law was the
principle that punishment for an injury should require the infliction
of the same injury on the culprit. Even should a house collapse and
the son of the householder be killed, it was the guilty builder who
must suffer the loss of his own son. The law was understood and
adhered to. And, thus regulated, Babylonian communities prospered as
never before.
There was a standing army that kept the frontiers
safe and quiet, trade was active, Babylonian merchants used temples as
storehouses, loaned money like banks, and dealt in merchandise.
Hammurabi's commercial influence was widely felt. To train the future
generation and furnish clerks for business and government, schools
were established. Clay tablets with the exercises of youths 4,000
years ago have been found. This was the first chapter of early human
progress along the "twin rivers". It was swept away by the
horse-breeders (Babylonians called them "animals of the mountain") in
the 20th century BC.
The second chapter of the history of the "twin
rivers" occurs in the north-east corner of the desert bay overlooking
the Tigris on the east and the desert on the west and south. At Assur,
the Assyrian civilisation developed, rising to a peak from about 750
to 612 BC. Nineveh, to the north of Assur, became the capital. The
lofty and massive walls of this city, built by the powerful
Sennacherib, stretched along the banks of the Tigris. Here, from a
lavish palace, he ruled the western Asiatic world with an iron hand,
collecting tribute from all the subject peoples and maintaining a
system of royal messengers to transmit royal business. It was the
beginning of a postal system, and there are indications that it was
already in existence in Asia under Egyptian rule, as far back as 2000
BC. [From
the Cradle of Civilisation, Al Ahram, Cairo] |
Among my many Arab
acquaintances, two stand out for very different reasons. Fahry Shehab was
a former financial adviser to the government of Kuwait. He was also an
Oxford Don, and a frustrated mechanic to boot. His lifelong hobby
interest was motor cars, and he longed to become proficient in their
maintenance and repair. But when he attempted to enter a course on motor
vehicle mechanics, he was refused admittance on the grounds that he was a
University don (though why that should be, neither he nor we could
fathom!). Fahry lived for a period in Bridge of Weir in the west of
Scotland, which was where I first made his acquaintance with a few
friends. He was the soul of politeness and courtesy, and for many years,
advised us on contacts with the Middle East, and on conducting business in
the Arab world.
The other friend was an
Iraqi, Nabil Orow, who became a political refugee during the time of
Saddam Hussein’s dreadful rule. Nabil had been a member of the Baath
party, but after seeing from the inside how the regime operated, he took
the chance to apply for asylum in the west, when on an extended visit to
Europe. During his time in Italy, Nabil came to reevaluate his political
and religious beliefs, and to reconsider his future. I met him in Rome
and befriended him for a period when he feared that his asylum application
would fail. Knowing what Saddam’s men would do to him if he was sent back
there, he said he would commit suicide rather than be forced to return.
So, we spent many evenings and weekends together while I tried to talk him
out of taking his own life, and while we planned and worked on renewed
applications to be accepted in Britain, America, or Australia.
I wrote to my local MP in
Scotland, - Malcolm Rifkind, who was briefly Secretary of State for
Scotland, and later Foreign Secretary. Mr Rifkind, (since knighted), was,
as ever, attentive and considerate, but was unable to move the British
bureaucracy on the matter. No one in official position appeared to take
Orow’s situation seriously. Meeting up with Rifkind on the Edinburgh
shuttle flight to London, I mentioned what treatment awaited Orow back in
Baghdad, and he seemed quite shocked. However, we persevered, and
eventually Nabil was accepted by Australia. There he married a lovely
girl and raised a small family, though he suffered from some post-trauma
stresses for years.
In 1978 I was asked to go
to North Yemen for a month, by the Indian Ocean Programme which was then
headed by a fine Newfoundlander, Harry Winsor, one of the original team of
fisheries specialists in the Food and Agriculture Organisation. North and
South Yemen were then separate states. One was the Yemen Arab Rebublic,
and the other was PDRY, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen which
was beginning its brief flirtation with Marxism. (As a comedian once
remarked, “any country with democratic in its name, usually is’nt”)!
I found the capital Sanaa and its culture to be quite medieval. Women
were completely veiled; - not an inch of skin visible anywhere. Even the
eyes were hidden behind a lattice in the veil. The men, mostly bearded,
wore turbans and had ornate curved knives stuck in the sash belt around
their waist. Many also carried guns slung over their backs or shoulders;
- old fire-pieces they were, that appeared to belong more in a museum than
in actual use during the later 20th century. The food in the
quasi-Western restaurants in hotels in Sanaa and Hodeidah, was pretty
awful. The menus were the same in each, and even contained the same mis-prints.
I found the local food in the roadside eating places away from the city
much better. They served mutton soup, and a kind of spicy potato stew
that one dipped into with pieces of bread torn of a large flat round
loaf. The girls in those places were not veiled like their city
counterparts. Instead, they had a gypsy look to them, with countless
bangles on their arms and ankles.
Map of the Republic of
Yemen. For many years divided into north and south Yemeni states, the
country is once more united.
Sanaa, ancient city and
capital of Yemen.
The country was
fascinating to me for several reasons. This was the land of the Queen of
Sheba. Her capital was at Marib, east of Sanaa where she had built
enormous dams and cut huge water tanks in the rock, amazingly engineered
to catch the rain water that ran along the wadis parallel to the coast
during the brief periods of heavy rain that occurred every few years.
General Gordon (of Khartoum fame) discovered similar water storage tanks
in Aden where they can be seen to this day. The Arabs called her Bilqis,
but to the Israelis she is She’va, though some identify her with Makeda.
Her name is not mentioned in the Bible. In the first century AD, the
historian Josephus referred to her as Nikaulis. She is reputed to have
borne a son to Solomon, who was later sent to Jerusalem for education, and
returned to Sheba with 70 nobles to help him run the country. He was
Menelek, or Ibn al-Hakim (son of the wise). His descendents ruled the
Sheba region for centuries, and the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile
Selasse, claimed to be his direct descendant which is why he took the
royal Jewish title, “Lion of the tribe of Judah”.
Yemen, called “Arabia
Felix” by the Romans, was renowned for its wars and feuds, and the
period of my visit was no exception. President Ali Saleh quarreled with
the head of the army commando unit who stormed out of Sanaa and took 600
of the troops south across the border. While I was driving up from Al
Mocca on the coast to Taiz in the mountains, jet aircraft buzzed overhead,
strafing the commando positions across the border.
The trip from Sanaa to
Hodeidah was an experience. I had to negotiate with a taxi driver for a
fee which he insisted included “qat money”. Qat is a narcotic leaf the
men chew there, much as South Sea Islanders drink kava. We headed off
down the desert road which had sheer drops on one side, and cliffs on the
other, past strips of green in tiny streamlet basins, and little villages
perched on pinnacles (no invader could ever really conquer that country).
The driver gulped what I hoped was water from a Johnny Walker whiskey
bottle, and chewed qat till his cheeks bulged and his eyes dilated. When
we reached the coastal plain it was getting dark and we had to beware of
camels which could be difficult to see in the fading light. They make
quite a mess when hit by a speeding car.
I was to visit Aden, South
Yemen, on two later occasions. This was still before the unification of
the territories in 1994. There had been a civil war in 1986, and the
royal yacht Britannia had taken numbers of expats out of the port to
safety in Djibouti. While I was there the Britannia was invited back so
the Yemenis could thank her for that act of assistance. I went through
the local museum which was like a record of local warfare the past 300 to
400 years. It also had a large number of gory colour photographs of the
recent civil war. At the airport one could spend the waiting time
counting bullet holes in the large plate glass windows. I believe these
scars of the conflict have all since been repaired.
The British had occupied
Aden in 1839, and made it a crown colony in 1957. In 1967 the territory
became the People’s Republic of South Yemen, and the People’s Democratic
Republic of Yemen in 1967. Aden, to me resembled the Khyber Pass, - a
region of almost perpetual conflict of one sort or another. Yet its
people, the Yemenis themselves were great company. They had a
forthrightness, a friendliness, and a sense of humour that I found rather
Scottish. The Arab propensity for hospitality, for argument, for honesty
and for shrewdly assessing character, used to make me think they must be
related to the Scots or the Celts in the dim and distant past.
North and south Yemen have
since been re-united, and remain a maverick part of the Arab world. The
Yemenis take a pride in making their own decisions, regardless of the
views or influence of their rich neighbour to the north, Saudi Arabia, and
regardless of the positions adopted by Oman, and the Emirate states to the
east. Osama Bin Laden’s family hailed from Yemen, (or part of it), and
this may shed some light on how he came to his strong, independent and
radical views.
Though I had landed at
Teheran airport a few times, and helped administer FAO projects in Iran, I
did not have an opportunity to visit that great country. The nearest I
got to the Iranian border was when travelling to the mountains south of
Ashgabat in Turkmenistan. I had known Iraninan students at workshops and
seminars, and once met with diplomatic officers from the government of the
late Shah. This was on a tour boat on Moscow river. Their monarch,
Mohammed Resa Shah Pahlavi, was visiting the Soviet Premier at the time.
His entourage of diplomats and aides exhibited culture, learning and
sophistication, and made stimulating conversation with me during the
afternoon river cruise. The Shah ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979. He was
briefly ousted in 1953 by the Prime Minister, Dr Mossadegh, but was
reinstated with CIA help shortly after. I recall our press making a fool
of Dr Mossadegh at the time because he wept in public. The Shah then
abolished the multi-party system and made the country a one-party state.
He established and supervised a ruthless organisation, the SAVAK secret
police. He was eventually deposed in 1979 despite having a powerful army
and an immense arsenal of weapons, and control shifted from the monarchy
to the ayatollahs. There followed a period of difficult relations with
the USA, and conflict with Iraq which the USA supported. In fact the
United States had armed both of the belligerants in the Iran – Iraq war,
and had turned a blind eye to illegal arms to Iran sales engineered by
Colonel North. He and his boss, National Security Adviser John
Poindexter, ignored the law and lied to Congress over dealings with Iran
and support to Contras in Nicaragua. They destroyed evidence in the form
of e-mail records but back-up tapes were recovered by the FBI and the
Tower Commission.
Dr Mohammad Mossadegh,
Prime Minister of Iran who was deposed in a CIA engineered coup in 1953.
The United States Government apologized publicly for that interference in
2000. Mossadegh was a popular Premier who sought to keep Iranian oil out
of foreign hands. The British and American press ridiculed him after he
broke down in tears following his overthrow and arrest.
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
of Iran. He ruled from 1941 to 1979. I met his entourage on the Shah’s
official visit to Moscow in 1965.
A dreadful incident
occurred on July 3 1988, when an Iranian air liner on a regular flight (IA
655) from Bander Abbas to Dubai, was shot down by a US cruiser, the
Vicennes. It was an ordinary civilian flight which our project
officers often took, although some of President Reagan’s apologists
claimed otherwise. Ultimately the American government paid $ 61 million
as an ex gratia compensation, but it never admitted any fault.
Vice President George Bush (senior) stated at the time that he would
“never apologise for the United States, no matter what the facts were”.
290 passengers and crew perished in the shooting down of the Airbus
300, including over 60 children and 38 non-Iranians. The Captain of the
Vicennes, and his commanding officer were both decorated with
Legion of Merit medals in 1990 for their part in the attack on the
civilian airliner.
An Iranian Air passenger
jet of the type shot down by the US Navy on 3 July 1988 with the loss of
290 passengers and crew. It was on a regular flight from Bandar Abbas to
Dubai.
The US warship Vicennes
that fired the missile which destroyed the Iranian passenger plane during
the Iran / Iraq war. The Commander was decorated and commended for his
action.
Some observers believe
that the bombing of the Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, 5½
months later, on December 21, 1988, was a retaliation by Middle Eastern
groups, for the shooting down of the Iranian flight IA 655, and that Libya
had little to do with it. A telephone warning had been received on
December 5th, stating that an American airliner flying from
Frankfurt to the USA would be destroyed by a bomb in two weeks time. The
caller stated that the bombing would be the work of the Abu Nidal
organisation. The warning was distributed to airlines in Frankfurt, but
was ignored by the Pan Am office.
President Bush appointed a
President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, PCAST, to
review and report on aviation security in the light of the downing of PA
103. At a meeting with victims’ relatives in the U.S. Embassy in London
on 12 February 1990, a PCAST member told relative Martin Cadman, “Your
government and ours know exactly what happened. But they are never going
to tell”. Veteran British Member of Parliament, Tam Dalyell, reminded
the House of Commons of this statement on 11th July 1990, - a
statement that he claimed had never been refuted.
Wreckage of the Pan Am
flight at Lockerbie Scotland, December 21, 1988. It is believed that a
Middle East group had it bombed in retaliation for the Iran Air plane
shooting by the United States. However the US decided to prosecute 2
Libyans for placing the bomb. It is now generally admitted they were not
guilty.
Veteran Labour Member of
Parliament, Tam Dalyell who persistently questioned the British and US
governments’ version of the Pan Am bombing, and defects in the subsequent
trial.
Suspicions over the Pan Am
bombing and the subsequent trial and conviction of a single Libyan for the
crime, Abdel Besset Al Megrahi, have intensified since the discovery of a
strange link with a fingerprint case in Scotland. Policewoman Shirley
McKie was accused by the SCRO (Scottish Criminal Records Office) of
leaving a print at a murder scene in Glasgow in 1999 and was subsequently
tried for perjury. She was acquitted, and her father, a former police
officer himself, pursued the matter doggedly. Fingerprint experts in
England, the USA and Australia testified that the supposed print could not
possibly have been hers, and some averred after seeing the subsequent
copies, that the original print had been doctored to make it appear to
belong to the officer in question. There was puzzlement in Scotland over
the Scottish Executive’s harassment of Miss McKie and its refusal to
permit an independent public enquiry to take place. Then the Scotsman
newspaper obtained copies of official documents that showed that the head
of Police in Tayside who had looked into the matter, concluded that
criminal charges should be brought to bear on some officers of the SCRO
Scotland’s main fingerprint unit. It was further disclosed that the
Lord Advocate Colin Boyd, who had refused to mount a prosecution but
who had decided instead to charge McKie with perjury was the official in
charge of the Libyan Lockerbie bombing trial. It was also later revealed
that the FBI had put considerable pressure on British and Scottish
authorities to prevent any public enquiry into the McKie case, which might
cast doubts on SCRO competence, and by implication, on the Lockerbie
trial.
Shirley McKie, the Scottish
policewoman at the centre of a scandal about the operations of the SCRO,
the Scottish Criminal Records Organisation. She was falsely accused then
freed with £ 750,000 compensation, but the UK government and the Scottish
Executive would not reveal why or investigate the SCRO. Then Lord
Advocate Colin Boyd resigned. He had handled the Lockerbie trial in the
Hague and was believed to have covered up CIA tampering of evidence at
that trial.
The father of one of the
Pan Am flight victims, Dr Swire, wrote to the press pointing out some
parallels between Solicitor General / Lord Advocate Boyd’s handling of both cases. Both
the Lockerbie trial and the fingerprint case rested on slender evidence –
in the one the charred remains of pieces of a supposed timer, and in the
other a much-disputed fingerprint. In neither case would Boyd allow
anyone to view the original piece of evidence. In both cases the SCRO and
related investigation offices were involved.
Some concluded that the
United States was determined to obtain a conviction for the Lockerbie
bombing, both to abate public outcry, and to direct attention away from
the true story of the Pan Am bombing. The real suspects of that bombing
could have exposed the dealings of Colonel North, and the hypocrisy of the
USA which had armed despots and Bin Laden-type Arabs. Any shadow of doubt
thrown against the Scottish SCRO would automatically put the Lockerbie
verdict in doubt. Therefore, the Scottish Executive, including its First
Minister and its Minister of Justice, absolutely refused to permit a
public enquiry, and the now suspect Attorney General threw his weight
behind their decision.
Colonel Oliver North, who
was deeply involved in selling arms to Iran to finance Contra mercenaries
in Central America, contrary to official US government policy. He went on
to play a nefarious role in the Middle East, and may have been partly
responsible for setting up Terry Waite for abduction by Arab militants,
which may explain Waite’s public expression of forgiveness to North at a
televised meeting.
|
Pan Am 103 / Lockerbie questions
The father of
Flora Swire, one of the 270 innocent victims of the Pan Am bombing, Dr
Jim Swire, and other concerned persons have raised numerous questions
about the downing of flight Pan Am 103 and related incidents, in an
endeavour to uncover the truth of the whole matter. They have met
largely with a wall of official silence and non-response. One of
their conclusions was that the Lockerbie trial failed several basic
principles of justice and evidence. Among the many queries were
concerns on the involvement of one Vincent Cannistraro who was put in
charge of the CIA investigation but who was not required to appear as
a witness. Cannistraro was one of the leaders of the brutal CIA
Nicaragua campaign, financed partly by the “arms for Iran” Contra
scandal. He was also involved in secretly helping to arm Osama Bin
Laden and the Taliban in the 1980’s but none of these matters were
revealed at the trial. During 1986 – 88 he was responsible for White
House disinformation and lies against Libya. During the Lockerbie
investigation, his agents removed evidence illegally and reinserted at
least one piece after it had been tampered with. The forensic
scientists Lockerbie notebook contained a page recording the only
fragment of bomb found at the scene. The page had been manually
inserted, and all pages subsequently renumbered by hand.
The Maltese
shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, who provided conflicting identification
evidence, had been promised $ 4 million by the USA if Al Megrahi was
convicted, but none of that was revealed at the trial. Palestinian
terrorist Marwan Khreesat was employed by Ahmed Jibril, Jordanian
intelligence and possibly also the CIA to make barometrically
triggered bombs for Jibril’s group, targeting Pan Am flights. Why was
one stolen just a day before Khreesat’s arrest ? Could it have been
the fatal bomb on flight 103 ? More alarmingly, the UK Government
issued two telex warnings days before the bombing. One carried a
picture of the Khreesat bomb with instructions to the airline that if
such a device was found, it should be “consigned to the hold of the
plane”. Two days after the bombing, Iran admitted paying the Jibril
group $ 11 million, and some months later, paying $ 0.5 million to Abu
Talb. These allegations all point to the generally believed
explanation of the destruction of the Pan Am flight, - that it was a
pledged response to the downing of a civilian Iranian jet (flight IA
655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai) by the USS Vicennes earlier
that year, with the loss of 290 innocent passengers. (Though denied
at the time, the Vicennes was later admitted to have been
inside Iranian territorial waters, and firing on Iranian boats when it
shot the airliner). The US government never admitted liability,
but under President Clinton, on 26 February 1966, it agreed to to pay
an ex gratia sum of $ 61.8 million to Iran and the flight
victims families.
The IA 655
shooting and its aftermath brought out some shameful propaganda and
‘spin’ by American politicians and reporters. Ronald Reagan claimed
that the civilian jet was diving towards the U.S. Navy ship, and
increasing speed. Larry King demanded to know from the Iranian
Ambassador, “why a predominately business flight was carrying so
many women and children” !!! This was rubbish. I knew the flight
which my FAO colleagues often took. Captain William C Rogers III of
the guided missile cruiser, and his air warfare coordinator, Lt. Com.
Lustig, were awarded the Legion of Merit medal by President George H W
Bush in 1990, for “excellent meritorious conduct” on the day in
question. But back to Pan Am flight 103, -
Behind or
around the Pan Am / Lockerbie crash, and other sinister events like
the illegal sale of arms to Iran, the involvement of the CIA in the
drug trade, the financing of brutal Contras in Nicaragua, and the
abduction and imprisonment of Terry Waite, - lurks the shadow of one
Colonel Oliver North. An Australian banker who studied the Lockerbie
case in great detail claimed to me that though most American personnel
were warned off flight 103, it contained some CIA agents en route the
USA to testify against Oliver North over “arms for Iran” and other
matters. But this belief and much of the information above has not
been endorsed or admitted by U.S. or UK authorities. |
The city of Teheran,
capital of Iran
Map of the theatre of the
Iran-Iraq war 1980 to 1988.
|
Other questions
The more one looks into the details of the Pan Am
flight bombing, the more questions are raised. I mention some here,
and readers can peruse the blogs at leisure on the internet. One of
the troubling issues concerns the individuals who cancelled their
reservations on PA 103, and others one would have expected to be
pulled out (if official warnings were issued), yet who did travel on
the flight, and so perished with the 259 victims.
Pick Botha, (former South African Foreign
Minister) was to travel on 103 en route to the UN New York to sign
the Accords granting independence to Namibia. Not so fortunate was
the UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bengt Carlsson, also headed for the
UN meeting. He was to die on flight 103. The United States
Ambassador to Lebanon at that time John McCarthy, is believed to
have withdrawn from the flight as was Steven Greene of the Office of
Intelligence of the U.S. Drug enforcement Agency, and a son of
Oliver Revell of the FBI.
If as appears to be the case, certain U.S. and
diplomatic figures were warned or advised not to go on flight 103,
why was a party of CIA officers not aware of this or not directed to
another airline ? Among those killed were at least 4, and perhaps
5 or more, agents from the U.S. intelligence services. Their names
were, Matthew Gannon and Major Chuck McKee of the Agency’s Beirut
office. Accompanying them (possibly as bodyguards), Ronald
Lariviere, also from Beirut, and Daniel O’Connor from the American
embassy in Nicosia. All four had flown from Cyprus that morning,
and McKee is believed to have been trying to locate and secure the
release of American hostages being held by Hezbollah. Some students
of the event and the CIA operations believe that McKee and his
colleagues had uncovered sinister connections between Oliver North
and drug dealers in the Middle East, and were to report on this back
in the USA. Certainly the CIA showed great interest in McKee’s
luggage. They are understood to have taken his suitcase from the
crash site, and returned it later devoid of contents.
McKee’s mother, Beulah, strongly suspected
collusion of intelligence authorities in her son’s death, and has
badgered the government in vain for years, to get at the truth, and
obtain answers to her questions. Interviewed by Time magazine,
Beulah McKee, then 75, said she thought that her son’s death was the
result of a government operation gone horribly awry. She was never
satisfied with what Washington officials told her.
Pan Am’s insurers hired a security company,
Interfor, to investigate. They supported the suspicion of U.S.
involvement with a Middle East heroin smuggling operation, and the
switch of the bomb suitcase with the drugs one. The heroin
operation may have been part of a drugs for hostages deal, organised
by a rogue CIA unit in Frankfurt and somehow linked to Oliver
North’s arms for Iran to finance Contras, scandal.
Parents of Lockerbie victims, Paul Hudson, a New
York lawyer, and Dr Jim Swire of England, wrote jointly to President
George HW Bush, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, accusing them
and their administrations of downplaying evidence and stringing out
the investigation till the case could be dismissed as ancient
history. |
Probably
the most distinguished commentator on the Lockerbie / Pan Am case is
Professor Robert Black, a distinguished academic lawyer who is held in
high regard internationally. The following brief on him is from the
Edinburgh University web site:
“Robert
Black has been Professor of Scots Law in the University since January
1981, having previously been in practice at the Bar. For various periods
between 1983 and 1999 he served as Head of the Department of Scots
(later Private) Law. He has been an Advocate since 1972, a QC since 1987
and a member of every Dean's Council from 1984 to 2003. From 1987 to
1996 he was General Editor of The Laws of Scotland: Stair Memorial
Encyclopaedia (25 volumes), having previously acted for six years as
deputy to the late Sir Thomas Smith QC. From 1981 to 1994 he served as a
temporary sheriff. Over the years Robert Black has acted as the Law
Society of Scotland's examiner in Evidence and as the examiner in Civil
and Criminal Procedure and Pleading for solicitors seeking extended
rights of audience, and as the Faculty of Advocates' examiner in Private
Law. He has taken a close interest in the Lockerbie affair since 1993,
not least because he was born and brought up in the town, and has
published a substantial number of articles on the topic in the United
Kingdom and overseas. Professor Robert Black is often referred to as the
architect of the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands: see
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/ and
http://web.archive.org/web/20020524233852/http://www.thelockerbietrial.com/
“
Interested readers should consult the web sites above.
The following is an extract from Professor Black’s papers on the
Lockerbie trial, reproduced with his kind permission :
Introduction
On 31 January 2001, after
just over one hundred and thirty court days of a trial that had started
on 3 May 2000, the three judges in the Lockerbie trial (Lords
Sutherland, Coulsfield and MacLean) returned a unanimous verdict of
guilty of murder in respect of the first accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed
Al-Megrahi, and a unanimous verdict of not guilty of murder in respect
of the second accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhima1.
Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that
he serve at least twenty years.
The prosecution in their
closing submissions conceded that the case against the accused was
entirely circumstantial. That, of course, is no bar to a verdict of
guilty. Circumstantial evidence can be just as persuasive and just as
damning as the direct evidence of eyewitnesses to the commission of a
crime. But to many observers, including me, it seemed that the case
presented by the prosecution was a very weak circumstantial one, and was
further undermined by the additional prosecution concession that they
had not been able to prove how the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 got
into the interline baggage system and onto the aircraft.
The trial court’s crucial
findings and were they justified?
From the 90 paragraph
written judgement produced by the trial court (available on the Scottish
Courts website
http://www.scotcourts.gov.uk) it is clear that the court convicted
Megrahi on the basis of the following nine factors.
1. The bomb was
detonated through the mechanism of a MST-13 digital electronic timer
manufactured by a Swiss company (MeBo) and supplied principally (but not
exclusively) to Libya.
Commentary.
The judges accepted prosecution evidence
that a fragment of circuit board found among the wreckage of Pan Am 103
came from a MeBo MST-13 timer. The managing director of MeBo had denied
this in his evidence, but his credibility was, unsurprisingly, assessed
as being very low. The evidence established that timers of this model
were supplied predominantly to Libya (though a few did go elsewhere,
such as to the East German Stasi). This fragment is also
important since it was the only piece of evidence that indicated that
the Lockerbie bomb was detonated by a stand-alone, long-running timing
mechanism, as distinct from a short-term timer triggered by a barometric
device when the aircraft reached a pre-determined altitude (a method
known to be favoured by certain Palestinian terrorist cells operating in
Europe in 1988). The provenance of this vitally important piece of
evidence was challenged by the defence and, in their written Opinion,
the judges accept that in a substantial number of respects this
fragment, for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained, was not
dealt with by the investigators and forensic scientists in the same way
as other pieces of electronic circuit board (of which there were a
multitude). The judges say that they are satisfied that there was no
sinister reason for the differential treatment. But regrettably they do
not find it at all necessary to enlighten us regarding the reasons for
their satisfaction.
2. A company of which a
member of the Libyan intelligence services (Badri Hassan) was a
principal for a time had office accommodation in the premises of the
Swiss manufacturer, MeBo.
3. Megrahi was a member
of the Libyan intelligence service.
Commentary.
The only evidence to this effect came from a
Libyan defector and CIA asset, Abdul Majid Giaka, now living in the
United States under a witness protection programme. He gave evidence
highly incriminating of both Megrahi and the co-accused Fhima. However,
the trial judges rejected his evidence as wholly and utterly unworthy of
credit, with the sole exception of his evidence regarding the Libyan
intelligence service and Megrahi’s position therein. The court provides
no reasons for accepting Giaka’s evidence on this issue while
comprehensively rejecting it on every other matter.
4. The suitcase which
contained the bomb also contained clothes and an umbrella bought in a
particular shop, Mary’s House, in Sliema, Malta.
5. Megrahi was
identified by the Maltese shopkeeper as the person who bought the
clothes and umbrella.
Commentary.
The most that the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony
Gauci, would say (either in his evidence in court or at an
identification parade before the trial or in a series of nineteen police
statements over the years) was that Megrahi “resembled a lot” the
purchaser, a phrase which he equally used with reference to Abu Talb,
one of those mentioned in the special defence of incrimination lodged on
behalf of Megrahi. Gauci had also described his customer to the police
as being six feet [183 cms] tall and over fifty years of age. The
evidence at the trial established (i) that Megrahi is five feet eight
inches [173 cms] tall and (ii) that in late 1988 he was thirty-six years
of age. On this material, the judges found in fact that Megrahi was the
purchaser.
6. The purchases were
made on 7 December 1988, a date when Megrahi was proved to be on Malta
and not on 23 November 1988 when he was not.
Commentary.
By reference to the dates on which
international football matches were broadcast on television on Malta,
Tony Gauci was able to narrow down the date of purchase of the items in
question to either 23 November or 7 December.
In an attempt to establish just which, the weather conditions in
Sliema on these two days were explored. Gauci’s evidence was that when
the purchaser left his shop it was raining to such an extent that his
customer thought it advisable to buy an umbrella to protect himself
while he went in search of a taxi. The unchallenged meteorological
evidence led by the defence established that while it had rained on 23
November at the relevant time, it was unlikely that it had rained at all
on 7 December; and if there had been any rain, it would have been at
most a few drops, insufficient to wet the ground. On this material, the
judges found in fact that the clothes were purchased on 7 December.
7. The suitcase
containing the bomb was sent as unaccompanied baggage from Luqa Airport
in Malta, via Frankfurt, on the morning of 21 December 1988 on an Air
Malta flight, KM 180.
Commentary.
The trial judges held it proved that the bomb
was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported
on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988,
and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight
103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that
there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout
which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went
through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used
for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to
Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM
180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose
baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by
international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there
was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on
that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold
matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by
the passengers on the aircraft. The court nevertheless held it proved
that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.
8. Megrahi was in Malta
on the night of 20/21 December 1988 and left for Tripoli from Luqa
Airport on the morning of 21 December.
9. On this visit Megrahi
had been travelling on a passport (in a name other than his own) which
was never subsequently used.
Commentary.
Megrahi (inexplicably, in the view of many)
was not called by his lawyers to give evidence on his own behalf at the
trial; so no explanation of his use of this passport was ever supplied
to the court. There is an innocent (ie non-Lockerbie related)
explanation (involving his role in seeking to circumvent US trade
sanctions against Libya and obtain Boeing aircraft spare parts on behalf
of his employers, Libyan Arab Airlines) which could have been provided.
It is my firm view that
the crucial incriminating findings made by the judges were unwarranted
by the evidence led in court and were in many cases entirely contrary to
the weight of that evidence. I am convinced that no Scottish jury,
following the instructions traditionally given by judges regarding the
assessment of evidence and the meaning and application of the concept of
reasonable doubt, would or could have convicted Megrahi.
So how did it come about
that the three distinguished and experienced judges who concurred in the
verdict felt able to convict him?
In paragraph 89 of the
Opinion of the Court it is stated: “We are aware that in relation to
certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and
qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by
selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring
parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of
conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really
justified.” Regrettably, in my submission, the judges’ intellectual
recognition of the danger does not appear to have enabled them to avoid
it. [In
John Lawton’s excellent novel A Little White Death (Orion Books
Ltd, London, 1998) a fictionalised account of the Profumo affair and the
Stephen Ward trial, the hero (p501 of the 1999 paperback edition)
describes the presiding judge in the trial (Mr Justice Mirkeyn) as
follows: “Everyone doing what they think is expected of them. Mirkeyn
did the same. It’s probably never crossed Mirkeyn’s mind that he’s a
bad judge or a bent judge. He simply did what was expected. Didn’t
even need a nod or a wink.”]
Conclusion
Before the
verdicts in the original trial were delivered, I publicly expressed the
view that for the judges to return verdicts of guilty they would require
(i) to accept every incriminating inference that the Crown invited them
to draw from evidence that was on the face of it neutral and capable of
supporting quite innocent inferences, (ii) to be satisfied beyond
reasonable doubt that the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, positively
identified Megrahi as the person who bought from his shop in Sliema the
clothes and umbrella contained in the suitcase that held the bomb and
(iii) to accept that the date of purchase of these items was proved to
be 7 December 1988 (as distinct from 23 November 1988 when Megrahi was
not present on Malta). I went on rashly to express the opinion that,
for the judges to be satisfied of all these matters on the evidence led
at the trial, they would require to adopt the posture of the White Queen
in Through the Looking-Glass, when she informed Alice "Why,
sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before
breakfast." In convicting Megrahi, it is submitted that this is
precisely what the trial judges did.
As far as the outcome of
the appeal is concerned, some commentators confidently opined that, in
dismissing Megrahi’s appeal, the Appeal Court endorsed the findings of
the trial court. This is not so. The Appeal Court repeatedly stresses
that it is not its function to approve or disapprove of the trial
court’s findings-in-fact, given that it was not contended on behalf of
the appellant that there was insufficient evidence to warrant them or
that no reasonable court could have made them. These findings-in-fact
accordingly continue, as before the appeal, to have the authority only
of the court which, and the three judges who, made them.
Robert Black
Professor Emeritus of
Scots Law
Edinburgh, Scotland
On 28 June 2007 the
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s conviction
of the Lockerbie bombing back to the High Court of Justiciary for a
further appeal. The case had been under consideration by the SCCRC since
September 2003 and its statement of reasons (available only to Megrahi,
to the Crown and to the High Court) extends to over 800 pages,
accompanied by thirteen volumes of appendices. The Commission, in the
published summary of its findings. [To
be found at
http://www.sccrc.org.uk/ViewFile.aspx?id=293]
Rejected submissions on behalf of Megrahi to the effect that evidence
led at the trial had been fabricated and that he had been inadequately
represented by his then legal team, but went on to indicate that there
were six grounds upon which it had concluded that a miscarriage of
justice might have occurred. Strangely enough, however, only four of
these grounds are enumerated in the summary. They are as follows:
“A number of the submissions made on behalf of the applicant challenged
the reasonableness of the trial court's verdict, based on the legal test
contained in section 106(3)(b) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act
1995. The Commission rejected the vast majority of those submissions.
However, in examining one of the grounds, the Commission formed the view
that there is no reasonable basis in the trial court's judgment for its
conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary's House, took place
on 7 December 1988. Although it was proved that the applicant was in
Malta on several occasions in December 1988, in terms of the evidence 7
December was the only date on which he would have had the opportunity to
purchase the items. The finding as to the date of purchase was therefore
important to the trial court's conclusion that the applicant was the
purchaser. Likewise, the trial court's conclusion that the applicant was
the purchaser was important to the verdict against him. Because of these
factors the Commission has reached the view that the requirements of the
legal test may be satisfied in the applicant's case.
“New evidence not heard at the trial concerned the date on which the
Christmas lights were illuminated in thearea of Sliema in which Mary's
House is situated. In the Commission's view, taken together with Mr
Gauci's evidence at trial and the contents of his police statements,
this additional evidence indicates that the purchase of the items took
place prior to 6 December 1988. In other words, it indicates that the
purchase took place at a time when there was no evidence at trial that
the applicant was in Malta.
“Additional evidence, not made available to the defence, which indicates
that four days prior to the identification parade at which Mr Gauci
picked out the applicant, he saw a photograph of the applicant in a
magazine article linking him to the bombing. In the Commission's view
evidence of Mr Gauci's exposure to this photograph in such close
proximity to the parade undermines the reliability of his identification
of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself.
“Other evidence, not made available to the defence, which the Commission
believes may further undermine Mr Gauci's identification of the
applicant as the purchaser and the trial court's finding as to the date
of purchase.”
This new appeal will, at
the very least, address the fundamental issues of (i) whether there was
sufficient evidence to warrant the trial court’s incriminating findings
and (ii) whether any reasonable court could have made those findings
(and could have been satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of the guilt of
Megrahi) on the evidence led at Camp Zeist. Until this is done, I will
continue to maintain that a shameful miscarriage of justice has been
perpetrated and that the Scottish criminal justice system has been
gravely sullied.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
the UAR, each of which I visited only when in transit through the region,
together with Iraq and Iran, are the world’s richest oil states. The
whole region, and Saudi in particular, sits upon a sea of petroleum
deposits under the desert sands. The black liquid gold has financed the
enormous development of the area over the past 40 years. It has become
the world’s greatest supplier of fossil fuel energy, supplying a major
part of the energy needs of the USA, Europe, and much of the Far East.
The enormous surplus wealth has financed the opulent lifestyles of oil
sheikhs, the growth of petro-dollar banks, and also to some degree, the
activities of extremist groups like Al Qaida. The huge petroleum
corporations, mainly American, have also waxed rich and powerful from its
oil business. A mere 60 years ago the region was still medieval in
character, a hostile desert environment peopled by bedouin tribes and
quarreling sheiks, producing little of note but dates and camels, and
conducting a limited trade in gold, coffee, perfumes and gems. Today its
produce powers the world’s industries and transport systems, and finances
a major part of the global economy.
Arab fishing boats
However, we must leave
Arabia and continue east to the countries of Pakistan, and India.
|
