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Saturday 15 July 2017

BP lobbied UK Government to speed up prisoner transfer agreement

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in The Evening Standard on this date in 2010:]

BP admitted today that it put pressure on the British Government to speed up talks on a deal that led directly to the early release of the Lockerbie bomber.

In a statement the oil giant said that in "late 2007" it told ministers that "we were concerned about the slow progress that was being made in concluding a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya".
The agreement was a key piece of the complex diplomatic jigsaw that ended in the dramatic return of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to Tripoli on compassionate grounds last August. The lobbying came after BP signed a $900 million exploration agreement with Libya in May 2007.
BP said it was aware that any delay in signing the agreement "could have a negative impact on UK commercial interests, including the ratification by the Libyan government of BP's exploration agreement".
However, the company insisted that it did not get involved in the detail of al-Megrahi's release.
It said: "The decision to release Mr al- Megrahi in August 2009 was taken by the Scottish government. It's not for BP to comment on the decision of the Scottish government. BP was not involved in any discussions with the UK Government or the Scottish government about the release of Mr al-Megrahi."
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she would look at requests from US Senators to investigate the role BP played in the release.
Yesterday, Mrs Clinton confirmed she had received the letter from Democratic Senators Robert Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer "and we will obviously look into it".

Sunday 2 July 2017

US plot to snatch Megrahi

[On this date in 2011 an article headlined US tells Libya rebels: Capture the Lockerbie bomber for us was published on the Mail Online website. It reads in part:]


A dramatic mission to capture the freed Lockerbie bomber from Libya and return him to face justice in the United States was revealed last night.

Under a secret deal between Barack Obama and Libyan rebel leaders, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi would be detained by opposition troops and then handed over to US Special Forces.

Senior Congressional sources in Washington have disclosed to The Mail on Sunday that President Obama has told the Libyan rebels through intermediaries that a condition of continued support from the US is that they must hand over Megrahi if they enter Tripoli.

The mission would involve Megrahi being flown to a neutral Arab country by US Special Forces once he is handed over by the rebels, and then on to America to face trial. [RB: Megrahi had already faced trial and been convicted -- wrongly, in my view -- in a process that the United States supported and participated in. He could not have been tried again in the USA unless Federal Law had been changed to allow it.] British SAS soldiers are unlikely to be directly involved in the operation. (...)

If Megrahi is captured, the hope is he may implicate Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in the Lockerbie bomb plot.

The plan to capture the bomber came after US Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez met Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder last week to demand the US ‘continue working to return Abdelbaset Al Megrahi to prison’.

Mr Menendez has amended a Congressional Bill authorising the continued use of force in Libya to include a paragraph ordering ‘the continuation of Federal investigations into the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103’.

Congressional sources disclosed that the US will ‘grab’ Megrahi as soon as they can. (...)

When the US State Department was asked to comment on the Megrahi plot, an official said he would ‘take the question’. This is a regular tactic used by the State Department enabling it to neither confirm nor deny what is put to officials.

US government sources say if Megrahi were found guilty after a trial, he would get life without parole.

Although there would be calls for him to be executed, international pressure is likely to prevent the death sentence being carried out.

Friday 5 August 2016

Lockerbie fake goes on

[This is part of the headline over an article by the late Henk Ruyssenaars that was published on this date in 2008 on the Storming Heaven’s Gates website. It reads in part:]

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Professor H Köchler in April 2000 as the international UN-observer at the Scottish Court in the Netherlands concerning the Lockerbie Trial, and his comments on the Scottish Court's verdict in August 2003 were bitter. "This has been a political court case, where the verdict already was decided upon in advance", a shocked Professor Köchler, the UN-observer at the Scottish Lockerbie Court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands stated. "The whole is a spectacular miscarriage of justice." he said.

"This was a classical case of a "Show Process" from the time of the Cold War. Like they had in the Soviet Union and East Germany before the Iron Curtain fell," Professor Hans Köchler commented, after the verdict of the Scottish Court's conclusion in the Lockerbie Trial.

In a 'strange' way his remarks have since 2003 hardly been used by the international propaganda media, covering the biggest and most expensive mass murder trial in British legal history which ended when the court upheld the conviction of the Libyan agent Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed al-Megrahi." - The rest is at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4460.htm

It's all a fake, but this is what Reuters now spreads from Washington: ''US President George W Bush on Monday (Aug 4th 2008) signed into law legislation paving the way for Libya to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to compensate US victims of bombing attacks that Washington blames on Tripoli. The Libyan Claims Resolution Act clears the way to resolve all outstanding US claims related to what Washington regards as Libyan terrorist acts. These include the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people and the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco that killed three people and wounded 229.

"For too many years, Libya has refused to accept responsibility for its horrific acts of terrorism against American victims," said Sen Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat who sponsored the original legislation to allow compensation. "But after the pressure we applied, Libya will finally be held accountable for these devastating events. Our bill becoming law means these victims and their families can get the long overdue justice they deserve." The United States and Libya worked out a tentative deal to resolve all the outstanding cases. Libya has yet to sign the agreement but US officials said they expected it to do so after the deal was signed into US law.

Bush signed the bill before leaving Washington on a week-long visit to Asia. A group of Lockerbie victims' families said the new moves brought them a step closer to holding Libya accountable. "It is a relief to say that this part of our fight is coming to an end. There's still more work to be done and the families aren't done fighting for the truth," said Kara Weipz, spokeswoman for the Families of the Victims of Pan Am 103. "There are still a lot of things that we want to know."

Under the arrangement, Libya would not accept responsibility for the acts, but would provide the money to compensate the victims. If carried out, the deal could end the legal liability to Libya stemming from multiple lawsuits by families of the US victims, and it could herald a further warming in ties between Tripoli and Washington.  - Source: 2008 The International Herald Tribune http://tinyurl.com/63wc7u

Bush and his criminal buddies, including Sen Lautenberg who sponsored the original legislation to allow this criminal 'compensation', know that Libya had absolutely nothing to do with either the La Belle disco bombing or the Lockerbie disaster, and even part of the families of the victims know Bush and his ilk are lying: plane-truth.com/megrahi_innocent.htm

The Guardian partly shows how it also was done: "The key prosecution witness in the Lockerbie bombing trial was allegedly offered a $2m reward in return for giving evidence, raising fresh doubts about the safety of the case. Lawyers for Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people on board Pan Am Flight 103, have evidence that detectives investigating the bombing recommended that Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper from Malta, be given the payment after the case ended.

Mr Gauci's testimony at the trial was crucial to al-Megrahi's conviction. He told the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands that the Libyan had bought clothes at his shop which the prosecution claimed were packed into the suitcase bomb that exploded over Lockerbie on December 21 1988. The defence team believe Mr Gauci may have received a larger sum from the US authorities. His role in the case is to be central to al-Megrahi's appeal against his conviction, which the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said was unsafe.

They are to press for full disclosure of these payments, and the release of a potentially vital US document which is thought to cast doubt on official accounts about the timer allegedly used in the bombing, at an appeal hearing next week.

The secret document is believed to dispute prosecution claims that al-Megrahi used a digital timer bought from a Swiss company, Mebo, and then planted the bomb on a flight from Malta to Germany - a disclosure which would fatally undermine his conviction." Fresh doubts on Lockerbie conviction: The Guardian http://tinyurl.com/5vzxem

Friday 12 February 2016

“They're never going to tell”

[On this date in 1990, members of President George [H W] Bush’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) met members of the families of UK Lockerbie victims at the US embassy in London. What follows is taken from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103:]

On 29 September 1989, President [George H W] Bush appointed Ann McLaughlin Korologos, former Secretary of Labor, as chairwoman of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) to review and report on aviation security policy in the light of the sabotage of flight PA103. Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's Executive Assistant Director, was assigned to advise and assist PCAST in their task. Mrs Korologos and the PCAST team (Senator Alfonse D'Amato, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, Representative James Oberstar, General Thomas Richards, deputy commander of US forces in West Germany, and Edward Hidalgo, former Secretary of the US Navy) submitted their report, with its 64 recommendations, on 15 May 1990. The PCAST chairman also handed a sealed envelope to the President which was widely believed to apportion blame for the PA103 bombing. Extensively covered in The Guardian the next day, the PCAST report concluded:

"National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means of defeating terrorism. The Commission recommends a more vigorous policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists, but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions."

Before submitting their report, the PCAST members met a group of British PA103 relatives at the US embassy in London on 12 February 1990. Twelve years later, on 11 July 2002, Scottish MP Tam Dalyell reminded the House of Commons of a controversial statement made at that 1990 embassy meeting by a PCAST member to one of the British relatives, Martin Cadman: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened. But they're never going to tell." The statement first came to public attention in the 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie and was published in both The Guardian of 29 July 1995, and a special report from Private Eye magazine entitled Lockerbie, the flight from justice May/June 2001. Dalyell asserted in Parliament that the statement had never been refuted.

Sunday 3 January 2016

The Lockerbie case remains unsolved

[What follows is the text of an article by Nathan Thrall that was published in US News & World Report on this date in 2009:]

Twenty years after Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 residents of the town below, it appears that resolution has finally come to the decades-long mystery surrounding the worst terrorist attack in British history and the deadliest attack on American civilians before 9/11.
A Libyan intelligence officer has been convicted of murdering Lockerbie's 270 victims; the Libyan government, in a letter to the United Nations, has "accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials"; and less than two months ago, Libya completed payments of $1.5 billion to victims of terrorism, including Lockerbie's 189 American victims (35 of them Syracuse University students returning home from study abroad). Sanctions against Libya have been lifted, the United States has granted Libya immunity from further terrorism-related lawsuits, and the Senate confirmed the first U.S. ambassador to Libya in 36 years.
"We're proud to announce we won, and Libya has been held accountable," Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, said at a November news conference with the families of victims. One of the victims' relatives added, "We are free now to close this chapter in our nightmare."
But though a chapter may have closed, the Lockerbie case is today further from resolution than it has been since the investigation began 20 years ago.
An official Scottish review body has declared that a "miscarriage of justice may have occurred" in the conviction of the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The reviewers examined a secret document, provided to the United Kingdom by a foreign government and seen during Megrahi's trial by only the prosecution, that they said cast serious doubts on Megrahi's guilt. A new appeal of Megrahi's conviction is scheduled for this coming spring. The U.N. special observer appointed by Kofi Annan to Megrahi's trial, Hans Koechler, has declared that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted, as have the legal architect of his special trial, Prof Robert Black, and a spokesperson for the families of the British victims, Jim Swire.
Piece by piece, the major elements of the prosecution's case are falling apart. A high-ranking Scottish police officer has said vital evidence was fabricated. One of the FBI's principal forensic experts has been discredited. The lord advocate—Scotland's chief legal officer—who initiated the Lockerbie prosecution has called the credibility of the government's primary witness into question, stating that the man was "not quite the full shilling...an apple short of a picnic." Another prosecution witness now claims, in a July 2007 sworn affidavit, to have lied about the key piece of evidence linking Libya to the bombing.So if the case against Megrahi and his government is so thin, why would Libya pay compensation to the families of Lockerbie's victims?
One answer came from Libya's prime minister. He told the BBC that his government took no responsibility for Lockerbie and had merely "bought peace," agreeing to pay compensation to the families of victims because it was the only means of ending the far more costly sanctions against his country. Saif al-Qadhafi, the Libyan leader's son and one of the regime's most prominent spokespersons, recently told CNN that Megrahi "had nothing to do with Lockerbie." When asked why his government would pay the victims of a terrorist act in which they played no role, Qadhafi responded, "There was no other way around. Because there was a resolution from the Security Council, and you have to do it. Otherwise, you will not get rid of the sanctions. It was very political. Very political."
Megrahi has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and may not live to see his second appeal. If he does live and his appeal succeeds, a new and independent international investigation—as has been called for by the U.N. observer to the Lockerbie trial—may commence. If it does, the investigators will return to the primary suspect of the first year and a half of the original investigation: a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, whose bank account, according to a CIA officer involved in the investigation, received a transfer of $11 million two days after Lockerbie and whose leaders the investigators believed had been contracted by Iran to avenge America's inadvertent shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew.
Yet the more likely outcome is that Megrahi will die just before or after his second appeal and that with the closure of his death, like that of Libya's payments, most will forget that the Lockerbie case remains unsolved.
Nathan Thrall has written on US foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics for Commentary, the Jerusalem Post, the Middle East Review of International Affairs, and the New York Times.

Wednesday 30 December 2015

Lockerbie trial-related documents classified by US government

[What follows is the text of a report published by USA Today on this date in 1999. It no longer appears on the magazine’s website but can still be found here on The Pan Am 103 Crash Website:]

The Clinton administration has classified two documents related to an upcoming trial in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, intensifying concern among some victims' relatives about how thorough the prosecution will be. ''These are documents that need to be released,'' says Rosemary Wolfe of Alexandria, Va. Her stepdaughter, Miriam, 20, was one of 189 Americans killed when the Boeing 747 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, Dec 21, 1988.

The documents are a letter and the annex to the letter by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Sent to Gadhafi in February to persuade him to turn over two suspects for prosecution, they assured the Libyan leader that the trial was not intended to ''undermine'' the Libyan regime, according to US officials who have seen the text. The annex also promised that if convicted, the two Libyan intelligence agents -- Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah -- would not be questioned about other acts of the Libyan government.

State Department and White House officials say the assurances were necessary to persuade Gadhafi to cooperate and that no secret deals were struck. The trial, which begins in May in the Netherlands, will be held before Scottish judges who are not legally bound by the Annan letter or any other private assurances to Gadhafi. ''We've always said the evidence has to lead where it will lead,'' says Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman.

Other US officials, however, say Gadhafi would never have turned over the two men if he believed that they would implicate him or Libyans close to him. Relatives of the suspects are being held in Libya, essentially as hostages, the officials say, inhibiting the defendants from testifying fully. A half-dozen alleged co-conspirators also have ''passed away under various circumstances,'' according to a US official who asked not to be named. Wolfe and other relatives of victims have been read only portions of the documents by State Department and UN officials.

On Oct 12, Cliff Kincaid, president of America's Survival, a conservative, anti-UN group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents. It was denied on Dec 15 by Margaret Grafeld, director of the State Department's Office of Information Resources Management Programs and Services. Grafeld's letter, a copy of which was made available to USA Today, said the documents were classified ''in the interest of national defense or foreign relations.'' Kincaid says he will appeal.

The decision to classify the documents has intensified anger among some relatives of the victims. ''If these documents were classified all along, why were we read portions?'' Wolfe asks. She plans a separate Freedom of Information Act request. Sens Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, and Robert Torricelli, D-NJ, and Rep Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, also have written Secretary of State Madeleine Albright seeking release of the documents. They have been turned down.

State Department officials say they cannot release the items because they are UN documents. Fred Eckhard, Annan's spokesman, says they are private correspondence ''on a highly sensitive subject. How can you do diplomacy if you go making such things public?'' Some of the assurances to Gadhafi were negotiated by South Africa's former president Nelson Mandela and Saudi envoy to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

Many US officials regard the complicated diplomacy leading to the trial -- including seven-year UN sanctions that were suspended when the suspects were turned over in April -- as a victory that has gotten Libya out of the terrorism business. Since turning over the two suspects, Gadhafi has expelled the Abu Nidal terrorist group and transferred support from other radical Palestinians to the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization. Recognizing the change in Libyan behavior, Britain has sent an ambassador back to the Libyan capital. US oil company executives have been allowed to tour old property in Libya. A State Department provision barring the use of a US passport to travel to Libya is under ''active review,'' Reeker says.

US officials also are considering taking Libya off a State Department list of terrorist-sponsoring states. That would ease the way for US trade sanctions against Libya to be lifted if the trial proceeds smoothly and Gadhafi compensates families of the Pan Am victims. ''I think we can expect that Libya's reintegration into the international community will continue, whether we like it or not, so long as Libya avoids new terrorism or blatant challenges to the international order,'' Ronald Neumann, deputy assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs, told the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.

US officials note that leaders of countries and groups responsible for heinous acts are rarely subjected to personal punishment. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is now regarded as a peacemaker and the same diplomatic rehabilitation is likely for Syrian President Hafez Assad.

Those spending another difficult holiday season without their relatives might never accept Gadhafi's return to the fold, however, especially if they continue to believe that important information has been denied to them. ''We totally caved in,'' Wolfe says.

Monday 21 December 2015

A gaping hole

[On this date in 2007 I posted an item on this blog which reads in part:]

I have often on this blog had occasion to bemoan the apparent blindness of the mainstream media and commentators in the United States to the shakiness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi, to the weakness of the evidence on which it was based and to the fact that it has now been referred back to the High Court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission because there may have been a miscarriage of justice. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I draw attention to an article on the Congressional Quarterly website, CQ Politics by their National Security Editor, Jeff Stein. In this article, he outlines the problems with the official US/UK version of events and explores the most compelling of the alternative scenarios, with quotes from US security and intelligence operatives who doubt the official version. A welcome transatlantic breath of fresh air.

[Mr Stein’s article no longer appears on the CQ Politics (now Roll Call) website. However, it is to be found at other locations, including Ed’s Blog City. It reads as follows:]

Libya is close to getting off the hook for millions of dollars in payments to relatives of the 189 Americans who died in the bombing of Pan American Flight 103, amid a stiff new challenge to the 2001 verdict and rapidly warming relations between the erstwhile terrorist state and Washington.

It was 19 years ago this weekend that the airliner, bound from London to New York with 259 passengers, 189 of them Americans, exploded in the night skies over Scotland, killing all aboard as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie, the village where the fiery chunks of steel and other debris came crashing down.

A memorial service was planned for Friday at Arlington National Cemetery to mark the anniversary.

Back in 1988, Iran was immediately suspected of authoring the mass murder, in retaliation for the accidental downing of one of its own airliners by a US Navy warship in the Persian Gulf a few months earlier.

US intelligence agencies, in overdrive to find the culprits, quickly compiled evidence that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, had carried out the plot on behalf of Iran and Syria. (The PFLP-GC was formed to opposed PLO leader Yassir Arafat’s movement toward detente with Israel.)

Nevertheless, on Jan 31, 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges found Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, officially the head of security for Libyan Airlines, guilty of carrying out the plot and sentenced him to life in jail. A Libyan co-defendant was set free.

Libya always denied any guilt in the crime, but agreed to compensate relatives of the dead to open the door for normal relations with the United States. It also agreed to compensate victims of the 1986 bombing of the LaBelle discotheque in West Berlin, a gathering place for US soldiers. Libya also denied complicity in that attack, which killed three and wounded scores more, but likewise agreed on compensation payments.

Megrahi, now serving a life sentence in Scotland, could be freed soon, British authorities hinted on Thursday, as part of a broad normalization of relations with Libya.

Only a day earlier, the Bush administration managed to stave off a congressional effort, led by Sen. Frank R Lautenberg , D-NJ, to deny it funds to build an embassy in Tripoli until Libya completed payments to the relatives of those who died on Pan Am 103.

While Lautenberg lost that battle, he and his allies in the House did manage to prohibit the administration from giving Libya any US aid until the payments are completed.

‘A Gaping Hole’

The ranks of critics of the 2001 verdict have steadily grown through the years.

Among them is Hans Koehler, the eminent Austrian jurist who was appointed by the United Nations to ensure the trial was conducted fairly.

“It is highly likely that the sentenced Libyan national is not guilty as charged and that one or more countries other than Libya, through their intelligence services and/or financial and logistical support for a terrorist group, may have responsibility for the crime,” Koehler said in a formal statement this year.

Likewise, Robert Black, the senior University of Edinburgh legal scholar who devised the trial of the Lockerbie defendants in the Netherlands under Scottish law, noted that the prosecution never produced any direct evidence tying the defendants to the bomb that brought the plane down.

It was entirely “circumstantial,” he said, based on a single computer print-out of a baggage manifest, which was contradicted by other evidence. “A gaping hole in the prosecution’s case,” he called it.

But more sinister factors were at work in the investigation, Black and other authoritative sources close to the case told me.

Black told me that he suspected Libya was framed to avoid a case that would hold Iran and Syria responsible.

The first Bush administration needed Syria to stay in the broad Middle East coalition that it was readying to oust Iraq’s troops from Kuwait.

“I have been told by persons involved in the Lockerbie investigation at a very high level, that a public announcement of PFLP-GC responsibility for the bombing was imminent in early 1991,”

Black told me, confirming earlier UK press reports. “Then suddenly, and to the mystification and annoyance of many on the investigation team, the focus of the investigation changed to Libya.”

Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was based in Paris at the time and tracking Iranian terrorist operations, agrees.

Baer told me the Scottish commission reviewing evidence in the case was able to confirm that Iran and Syria paid the PFLP-GC to carry out the bombing.

Indeed, Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA’s investigation of the crash, was quoted several times in 1989 blaming Iran, and right after the 1991 verdict he said it “was outrageous to pin the whole thing on Libya.” (Oddly, last week he told me the evidence “always pointed to the Libyans.”)

But Baer says, “Everybody” in US intelligence knew about “Iran’s intention to bomb an American airliner” in response to the downing of one of its own only months earlier.”

“We knew that,” Baer added. “We had that solid.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency also thought the Iranians paid the PFLP-GC to do it.

Patrick Lang, chief of the DIA’s Middle East section at the time, told me he “signed off” on the DIA’s conclusion that “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorized and financed by Ali-Akbar (Mohtashemi-Pur), the former Iranian minister of Interior.”

“The operation was contracted to Ahmad Jabril” [the head of the PFLP-GC] . . . for $1 million,” said the Sept 24, 1989, memo, first reported last week in a London tabloid. “The remainder was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”

Lang said on Friday, “I still agree with that. We felt quite sure that this was a PFLP thing.”

“The CIA wouldn’t listen to that,” Lang added, because it couldn’t find proof of Iranian or Syrian complicity and was under immense pressure to solve the case.

Just last week, a Scottish newspaper, citing “sources close to the investigation,” recently cited specific transactions that the SCCRC allegedly had uncovered, including amounts and dates.

“This doesn’t exonerate Libya,” Baer cautioned. “Iran and Syria and Libya could have been working together.”

Plenty of Theories

Conspiracy theories have grown like barnacles on the much-questioned verdict, including far-fetched allegations of Israeli and even South African involvement in the crime.

On the Internet, some bloggers see the hand of the White House in the growing evidence of Iranian complicity in the Pan Am bombing, suggesting that the administration is further laying the groundwork for an attack on Iran.

The available evidence, however, suggests that the administration is primarily interested in getting Western companies’ access to Libya’s oil fields.

A particularly persistent rumor is that key witnesses were paid off by American intelligence to finger the Libyans.

Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss company that was said to have manufactured the timer used to detonate the Pan Am bomb, has claimed variously that he was offered “bribes” by the FBI and CIA to finger Libya.

Bollier’s company did in fact supply the circuit boards to Libya, he admitted, but also East Germany, where the PFLP-GC had an office.

Since Bollier had ongoing business with the Qaddafi regime, his veracity has often been questioned.

In response to my query, a CIA spokesman ridiculed Bollier’s accusations that it offered or paid him anything.

“It may disappoint the conspiracy buffs, but the CIA doesn’t belong in your story,” he said, insisting on anonymity.

An FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed, however, that the bureau met with Bollier in Washington in 1991, but denied he was offered anything to implicate Libya.

In a formal statement, FBI spokesman Richard Kolko emphatically rejected any suggestions of a payoff.

“Any accusations that any witness was paid to lie are complete fabrications and these ridiculous statements should be immediately discounted as the untruths they are,” Kolko said. “That is not the way the FBI operates.”

Likewise, allegations have persisted that Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper on Malta who testified, in spite of contrary evidence, that he sold Megrahi clothing that ended up in the suitcase bomb, was paid to finger the Libyans.

But Gauci was paid approximately $2 million from the State Department’s USA Rewards program, an authoritative source told me, along with another, still unidentified witness.

Together, they were paid somewhere between $3 million and $4 million for information leading to the conviction of Megrahi, the source said.

The State Department acknowledged to me that rewards were paid.

“A reward was paid out in the Lockerbie-Pan Am 103 case,” a spokesperson there said on condition of anonymity, “but due to operational and security concerns we are not disclosing details regarding specific amounts, sources, or types of assistance the sources provided.”

Freeing Megrahi

All this — and much more questionable evidence related to the electronic timers and witnesses — may soon be moot.

A British Ministry of Justice spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Foreign Minister Jack Straw had been in contact with Scotland’s justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, about a deal that would send Megrahi back to Libya.

Such a move could well make irrelevant a Scottish appeals court’s expected judgment that a “miscarriage of justice” occurred in the case.

Reopening the investigation to present evidence of an Iranian/Syrian connection to the Pan Am bombing would be extremely difficult if not impossible, in the view of all observers.

The commercial pressure against such a move would be extreme. Western oil companies are eager to develop Libya’s reserves.

How this will affect Libya’s stalled payments to relatives of the Lockerbie and LaBelle discotheque victims is unknown, but if past patterns hold true, they cannot be optimistic.

In July 2006, a lawyer for the LaBelle families was about to finalize a deal with Libya when the State Department announced its intention to take Libya off the terrorist list.

The deal evaporated, said attorney Thomas Fay.

“They had made an offer and we accepted and at their request had every client execute release of claims forms” he told me by e-mail late Friday.

“In short, we were not close to a deal, we had made the deal,” Fay said. “They just refused to pay when they came off the terrorist list.”