A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement
claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was
fabricated.
The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher -
has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board
crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.
The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the
statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi,
currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.
The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a
retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
(SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the
reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police
Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent
that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.
[...]
But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer's motives. He
said: "Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any
element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on
that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I
can't help but question their motive for raising the matter now."
An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer
approached them after Megrahi's appeal - before a bench of five
Scottish judges - was dismissed in 2002.
The insider said: "He said he believed he had crucial information. A
meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the
long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of
circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been
planted by US agents.
"Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he'd been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified.
"He also said that at the time he became aware of the matter, no one
really believed there would ever be a trial. When it did come about, he
believed both accused would be acquitted. When Megrahi was convicted,
he told himself he'd be cleared at appeal."
The source added: "When that also failed, he explained he felt he had to come forward.
"He has confirmed that parts of the case were fabricated and that
evidence was planted. At first he requested anonymity, but has backed
down and will be identified if and when the case returns to the appeal
court."
The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi
was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a
wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.
The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as
being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives,
and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to
Libya and the East German Stasi.
At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a
regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's
headquarters.
The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi
- to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was
later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American
murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of
scientific qualifications.
Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.
The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim
could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a
wild conspiracy theory. It has long been rumoured the fragment was
planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.
The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group
backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic
relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.
Following the trial, legal observers from around the world,
including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the
verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland.
Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from
the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more
than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the
bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.
A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were
telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications
they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.
"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the
script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected
agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a
manufactured case, mistakes were made."
Dr Jim Swire, who has publicly expressed his belief in Megrahi's
innocence, said it was quite right that all relevant information now be
put to the SCCRC.
Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity, said last
night: "I am aware that there have been doubts about how some of the
evidence in the case came to be presented in court.
"It is in all our interests that areas of doubt are thoroughly examined."
A spokeswoman for the Crown Office said: "As this case is currently
being examined by the SCCRC, it would be inappropriate to comment."
No one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland was available to comment.
The war was based and sold on lies. Nothing this administration has
said has been accurate or truthful. A majority of the American people
now believe this.
Smearing a mother who lost her child for no valid reason won't change this.
The rapidly dwindling minority of Americans who continue to search for
some rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq has been driven to the
brink of breakdown by the success of Sheehan's protest. Go to the
website of William F. Buckley's National Review magazine and you will
find Sheehan described in headlines as "nutty," dismissed by columnists
as "the mouthpiece... of howling-at-the-moon, bile-spewing Bush haters"
and accused of "sucking up intellectual air" that, presumably, would be
better utilized by Condoleezza Rice explaining once more that it would
be wrong to read too much into the August 6, 2001, briefing document
that declared: "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." Human
Events, the conservative weekly newspaper, dismisses Sheehan as a
"professional griever" who "can claim to be in perpetual mourning for
her fallen son" -- as if there is some time limit on maternal sorrow
over the death of a child.
Fox News Channel spinner-in-chief Bill O'Reilly accuses Sheehan of
being "in bed with the radical left," including -- horrors! -- "9-11
families" that are still seeking answers about whether, in the first
months of 2001, the Bush administration was more focused on finding
excuses to attack Iraq than on protecting Americans from terrorism. And
Rush Limbaugh was on the radio the other day ranting about how,
"(Sheehan's) story is nothing more than forged documents. There's
nothing about it that's real..." (Just to clarify for Limbaugh
listeners: Cindy Sheehan's 24-year-old son Casey really did die in Iraq, and his mother really
would like to talk with President Bush about all those claims regarding
WMDs and al-Qaida ties that the administration used to peddle the
"case" for war.)
The pro-war pundits who continue to defend the occupation of Iraq
are freaked out by the fact that a grieving mother is calling into
question their claim that the only way to "support the troops" is by
keeping them in the frontlines of George W. Bush's failed experiment.
Bush backers are horrified that Sheehan's sincere and patriotic
anti-war voice has captured the nation's attention.
What the pro-war crowd does not understand is that Cindy Sheehan is
not inspiring opposition to the occupation. She is merely putting a
face on the mainstream sentiments of a country that has stopped
believing the president's promises with regard to Iraq. According to
the latest Newsweek poll, 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's
handing of the war, while just 26 percent support the president's
argument that large numbers of U.S. military personnel should remain in
Iraq for as long as it takes to achieve the administration's goals
there.
The supporters of this war have run out of convincing lies and
effective emotional appeals. Now, they are reduced to attacking the
grieving mothers of dead soldiers. Samuel Johnson suggested that
patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, with their attacks
on Cindy Sheehan, the apologists for George Bush's infamy have found a
new and darker refuge.
So a surrogate war has produced a surrogate antiwar movement. This
time, mass protests would only cloud the issue. As the parent of a dead
soldier, Sheehan has so much moral authority precisely because so few
Americans including so few of us who supported the war risk sharing
her plight.
But if Sheehan's vigil says something important about Iraq, it also
says something important about President Bush. Sheehan, after all, has
only one demand: She wants to confront the president face to face. The
demand is so provocative because one of George W. Bush's defining
qualities is his aversion to exactly this sort of challenge. According to former Environmental
Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman, "There is a
palace guard, and they want to run interference for him." Former
Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill described Bush as "caught in an echo
chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle
around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on
everything."
If our president could take the time to dress up in a flight suit
and travel to an aircraft carrier, an executive version of a Super Bowl
touchdown dance, why can he not take the time to answer Cindy Sheehan?
Move America Forward's Shady Dealings. Max Blumenthal
has some great information about the front group that has bankrolled
the Creepy Caravan tour to attack Cindy Sheehan. Here's a little about
Sal Russo:
"If Kaloogian wants to fight
corruption, he should get up, turn the light on, and take a look in his
own slimy bed. After all, Move America Forward's "Chief Strategist,"
Sal Russo, who handled Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial
campaign, is knee-deep in unethical business dealings and scandals."
and this: "That's right. Move America Forward's Sal Russo ran tax shelters and bilked campaign donors out of $200,000.
Oh, and then there's the little thing about Russo and Simon being in
bed with a major drug trafficker, something they still can't explain" ...read on
Freeper Bust Update: 08/28/05 "Ken Robinson, of Richardson,
Texas, who described himself as a Vietnam veteran, was carrying a sign
at a “You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy!” rally. The sign read, “How to
wreck your family in 30 days by ‘b**** in the ditch' Cindy Sheehan and a picture of the sign appears above in this post. .”
Kristinn Taylor, an event organizer with FreeRepublic.com, heard about
the sign and rushed up to Robinson. “This is our rally and you can't
do that here,” he said, only for Robinson to insist he was within his
rights....
“Just get outta here!” Robinson yelled, and aimed
a kick at Taylor's midsection. Taylor called for security, and a young
Woodway policeman quickly showed up."
A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement
claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was
fabricated. 
The rapidly dwindling minority of Americans who continue to search for
some rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq has been driven to the
brink of breakdown by the success of Sheehan's protest. Go to the
website of William F. Buckley's National Review magazine and you will
find Sheehan described in headlines as "nutty," dismissed by columnists
as 
The pro-war pundits who continue to defend the occupation of Iraq
are freaked out by the fact that a grieving mother is calling into
question their claim that the only way to 
