The public uproar by Western leaders over the early release, on compassionate grounds, of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, Libyan al-Megrahi after a highly contentious trial in 2001 brings to mind André Gide’s 1921 observation that the true hypocrite is one who ceases to perceive his deception and lies with sincerity.

PanAm Flight 103 crashed in 1988 while flying over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people including 189 Americans.

The Lockerbie tragedy, as Chalmers Johnson noted in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, has been widely recognized as retaliation for the 1986 Reagan Administration’s aerial raid on Libya that killed, not President Muammar Khadaffi as intended, but his little step-daughter. [Papa Bush was Reagan’s VP at the time.]

The Sunday Times, London, however, in its front-page of March 26, 1989, claimed PanAm Bombers Identified. The article said anonymous intelligence sources had identified the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Ahmed Jibril as being behind the bombing. PLO sources had revealed the group received $10 million to bring down the plane in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian Airbus with 290 passengers on July 3, 1988 by the American Navy missile-cruiser Vincennes. President Reagan claimed the Vincennes had fired in self-defense – at an unarmed civilian airliner! [More reason for ‘Blowback’?] 

John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, co-authors of Cover-up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie, point out that more than just bodies were found in the wreckage of Flight 103. Among the dead were approximately $500,000 in American bills and an envelope with $547,000 in travelers cheques. The authors say something else was also found: heroin, to be exact.

People in the area were perturbed by the large numbers of CIA agents who showed up in Lockerbie within a couple of hours of the downing of the plane. They began looking for highly confidential papers among the wreckage, but found none. They also sought something of great importance, but would not specify what it was. They told Scottish officials "they’d know it when they found it."

Lisa Pease, former Editor of The Scotsman, noted: "The truth about what happened at Lockerbie appears quite a bit more complex than the cookie-cutter version presented by the mainstream media."

The direction of the case shifted dramatically in the fall of 1990 as Papa Bush, himself President by then, scrambled to assemble a coalition to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, she said. His administration was in need of Iranian and Syrian help, too, in freeing US hostages then held by Islamic militant groups in Lebanon.

Wrote Pease: "Also in 1990, spin-off investigations from the Iran-Contra scandal were underway with Iranian officials possessing possible information that could have incriminated President Bush as he was looking toward a tough reelection battle in 1992. In short, the Iranians held a number of cards that would have made them inconvenient targets of the PanAm investigation. Laying the blame on the Libyans let a lot of influential people off the hook."

"Under the crushing weight of draconian sanctions, Libya eventually realized the wisdom of producing members of its own intelligence apparatus who could help them engineer the lifting of crippling trade restrictions," wrote Michael Carmichael, founder of Planetary Movement, writing on the GlobalResearch website on August 21. In the course of time, two hapless Libyans, Al Megrahi and Khalifa Fhimah were extradited and sent to an obscure US military base called Camp Zeist in The Netherlands, where they were put on trial."

In 2007 an Observer expose written by Alex Duval Smith reported that "a key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake, with allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police."

Added Carmichael: "To make matters worse, over the years intelligence and police officials have disclosed that they were in control of evidence that proved Megrahi to be innocent. To recount only one bizarre incident, Susan Lindauer, a US Congressional aide, testified that Dr. Richard Fuisz who was employed by the CIA had informed her that he knew for a fact that Megrahi was not involved in the Lockerbie bombing – and that he could identify the actual perpetrators, "if the government would let me." After making her evidence known, Lindauer was charged with being an Iraqi agent and a federal court promptly gagged the loquacious Dr. Fuisz."

In 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the Megrahi case to the Justiciary, the Scottish Appellate Court, a development that could have led to his acquittal. The grounds for the Commission’s ruling were stark: exculpatory evidence had been repressed at the original trial. The official announcement from the Commission stated: "The applicant (Megrahi) may have suffered a miscarriage of justice."

Wrote John Pilger: "The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as ‘a babbling brook of bullshit’. Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi’s release. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release."

Dr. Ludwig De Braeckeleer, a Ph.D. in nuclear sciences who teaches physics and international humanitarian law, noted what Professor Hans Koechler, appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as international observer at the Camp Zeist trial had said: "Proper judicial procedure is simply impossible if political interests and intelligence services - from whichever side - succeed in interfering in the actual conduct of a court . . . The purpose of intelligence services - from whichever side - lies in secret action and deception, not in the search for truth. Justice and the rule of law can never be achieved without transparency."

In fact, on October 5, 2007 Edwin Bollier, head of the Zurich-based company MeBo, told Professor Koechler that during a visit to the FBI headquarters in Washington in early 1991, he was offered up to $4 million plus a new identity in the US if he would testify in court that the timer fragment that was allegedly found on the crash site around Lockerbie stemmed from a MST-13 timer that his company had delivered to Libya.

The Herald, Glasgow, reported that "a top secret [CIA] document vital to unearthing the truth about the Lockerbie bombing was obtained by the Crown Office but never shown to the defense team." The prosecution refused to make public the ultra secret document on the basis of national security, making many wonder what national security had to do with the Lockerbie bombing.

Said Dr. Jim Swire, who lost his daughter over Lockerbie: "It is shocking to me that after 19 years of trying to get to the truth about who murdered my daughter, national security is being used as an excuse." Swire believes the trial was flawed, and has pointed to a key piece of evidence of which the trial judges were not aware – a break-in at PanAm’s baggage assembly shed at Heathrow on the morning of the bombing. "It was not investigated. If Heathrow had behaved responsibly, my daughter might still be alive."

For now, De Braeckeleer encouraged readers to reflect upon a Persian saying, "Shame on those who committed the deed. Shame on those who allowed the deed to be committed."