Friday, October 2, 2009

Kafkaesque

In a couple of earlier posts I forwarded my opinions on the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and today I find my conclusions being substantiated by documents published online by Megrahi's lawyers that show that the DoJ (US Department of Justice) was asked to pay $2m to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who said in court that Megrahi had purchased clothes that were found in the case that supposedly held the held the Lockerbie bomb.

While this doesn't answer the question of who actually planted the bomb it might at least have us wondering why the money was paid to Gauci and with the former US Defence Intelligence Agency operative Lester Coleman reporting that "certain CIA and DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agents’ bags were routinely allowed to pass through Frankfurt and London Heathrow airports unchecked in order to allow CIA drug trafficking paralleling that in Latin America discovered in congressional investigations of Iran-Contra", there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the CIA, supported by the FBI, who built up the case, were behind Megrahri's, for them, convenient conviction.

My first confrontation with this theory was through the late Paul Foot's article, "The Great Lockerbie Whitewash" in John Pilger's edited, "Tell Me No Lies". What it does seem to suggest is that Washington did not want the case to be investigated properly and Megrahri's conviction was very much in their interests.

As I said, none of this answers the question as to who planted the bomb although Paul Foot's article and a number of other ariticles discuss theories regarding the real perpetrators in detail. Moreover, they all suggest that the CIA also had other reasons, apart from hiding their drug run, for not wishing a proper investigation to be pursued and with the first Gulf War, and with the need for Syrian support and Iranian neutrality in that war, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who were supported by Syria, were no longer responsible for Lockerbie and all of a sudden Libya and Gaddafi were behind it. Our myopic mainstream media accepted this went sudden change of story hook line and sinker.

Finally, while the injustice done to Abdelbasset Al Megrahi is an issue here, more significantly, we can see so-called accountable democratic governments going to great lengths to cover their crimes and we can see a mainstream media which largely facilitates their efforts in doing so. This, of course, was all to obvious prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and again during the Second Gulf War. Fortunately, we do not have to read their drivel and there are still those who make every effort to get to the truth. However, it is important that once a truth is uncovered, or even simply when a lie is revealed, that we act accordingly. If not, we might just find that freedom, which we still cherish, namely, freedom of speech, disappearing. Moreover, while Megrahi's conviction was also an ideal opportunity to throttle any investigation into the CIA drugs run that was going through Frankfurt Airport, more importantly, Megrahi's was a show trial and his conviction was for political and economic reasons and when politics and economics dicate the law we are all threatened, as indeed we are.

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