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The Lockerbie Fraud Again

by Dave Stratman


American politicians and media have justified Qaddafi’s murder by, among other things, associating Qaddafi with the 1989 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, known as the Lockerbie bombing. In the days following Qaddafi’s death, AOL ran a picture of Qaddafi’s corpse alongside wreckage of Flight 103. Hillary Clinton called for the Libyan convicted of the bombing to be jailed again.

There is evidence, however, that the Libyans accused of the crime had nothing to do with it, and that Lockerbie was a CIA false flag operation.

In 2003 a retired CIA officer made a sworn statement to attorneys representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi, one of two Libyans convicted of the crime, that the CIA had planted the tiny piece of circuit board found many miles from the scene of the crash.

In 2005 a Scottish police chief who had been involved in the investigation of Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi gave lawyers representing Megrahi a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing was fraudulent. According to Scottish news reports,

“The retired officer… 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 retired police officer said he did not come forward earlier because he was afraid that he would be pilloried for exposing the Scottish legal system.

"The trial," according to the father of one victim, was “a farce.” The Libyans were nevertheless convicted and Libya was required to pay billions of pounds in compensation to the families of the victims to get UN sanctions against the country removed.

In 2009 another witness came forward whose testimony further undermined the already flimsy case. The Scottish judiciary, however, worked out a deal whereby Megrahi, who was ill with terminal prostate cancer, was returned to Libya on condition that he not appeal his conviction.

By making the deal, the judiciary saved itself and the parties actually guilty of the crime from the thorough exposure that a new trial would have brought. It also made it possible for U.S. officials to continue to claim that Libya and Qaddafi had carried out a savage act of terrorism. The false flag operation was never completely exposed. The fraudulent image of terrorist Libya was allowed to persist.

None of this is to say that Qaddafi was a good guy. He was an undemocratic ruler who was, at least since 2002, a close ally of the U.S. But he was, apparently—like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega before him— an unreliable ally and therefore disposable.

Why did the U.S. turn on Qaddafi? For one thing there’s all that oil. Paul Craig Roberts makes a convincing case that taking over Libya is part of the U.S. strategy of pushing China out of Africa. Until the uprising, China had 30,000 personnel in eastern Libya working at oil concessions the Chinese had purchased; now the oil fields have fallen in to British, French, and American hands. Another reason may have to do with the Arab Spring. The NATO-backed “revolution” in Libya strikes a blow at authentic democratic revolution. The thugs who led it are doing the dirty work of Western imperial powers.

By all indications, Libya’s new rulers mean to impose Islamic rule on secular Libya. Though it contradicts conventional wisdom, this is actually a desired outcome for U.S. rulers. Political Islam has supplanted Communism as the enemy Americans are meant to fear. An Islamic outcome in Libya will be used to convince Americans that Arabs can’t be trusted with democracy.


Dave Stratman co-edits Newdemocracyworld.org. Contact him at newdem@aol.com.

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