GG - Salmond is a feartie

[faceless]

The real scandal about Lockerbie
By George Galloway
Jul 26, 2010
dailyrecord.co.uk

I never saw Alex Salmond as a feartie but that's how he looks after his refusal to appear before the Senate foreign relations committee to explain the reasons behind the release of the Libyan prisoner Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. He has let Scotland down, allowed us to be conflated with the hatred felt in the US against oil giant BP, and at a stroke cut the legs from the idea Scottish-America could play a role in his Scottish independence project. I would have grabbed this gold-plated invitation to speak the truth in the most powerful arena on the globe.

It worked for me five years ago in exactly the same committee room Salmond has forsaken. Then I, too, faced - entirely voluntarily - false allegations about connections to the dirty black stuff - oil. By the end of the session the senators, used to being treated like princes, looked like they'd heard enough of the Scottish accent and wished they'd never allowed me my big opportunity. Of course, it only works if you are telling the truth, have nothing to hide and have the courage of your convictions. And maybe there's the rub.

You see, I supported the release of Megrahi, but not for the reasons given by Kenny MacAskill. Indeed, if I thought Megrahi really had blown up hundreds of innocent people over Lockerbie I would have kept him behind bars until it was his turn to burn in hell. But I never believed it. I believe Libya was falsely framed for mass murder, Megrahi was falsely imprisoned in Greenock jail and I believe his then-imminent appeal would have unmasked a miscarriage of justice and placed us in the middle of the mother of all international scandals.

Megrahi was not dying when freed on "compassionate grounds", but Scotland was dying to get rid of him before he got to the Court of Appeal. The Libyan was forced to abandon his appeal in order to return to his country. Why? He has called for publication of all the documents relating to the case and now in the hands of the Scottish Crown Office. is has been refused. Why? Because the new evidence his solicitors had amassed was even more terrifyingly explosive than the bomb which blew the Pan Am jet out of the sky all those years ago, that's why.

Salmond's government took the right decision in freeing an innocent man, but they did so for the wrong reasons. They behaved in an unprincipled way, and that always ends in tears. As it happens, I believe Salmond when he says he was never lobbied by BP. They had no need to, they already had the British government of Tony Blair in their pocket. It is inconceivable that BP didn't put unrelenting pressure on Downing Street over Megrahi and that the PM didn't try everything he could to rid ourselves of this turbulent presence in Greenock prison. After all, BP had a chance to make a billion dollars worth of black gold off the Libyan coast - but only if the prisoner was freed.

When Blair met Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in the desert of Sirte it's unlikely the walls of the tent had ears. So we will never know for certain there was a deal. But that Blair lobbied for BP's deal is certain. at Gadda demanded the release of his falsely imprisoned comrade doubly so. Well, the prisoner was released and BP got the deal and, according to Gaddafi 's son, Blair has embarked on a mini career as an adviser to the Gaddafi family on the country's sovereign wealth funds.

Well, just one more thing, as Colombo used to say. What was it that brought together the New Labour governments' interest in Megrahi's release and the otherwise virulently hostile SNP administration's interest in closing this file? Why did the sovereign government of the UK allow this decision of such vital moment to the foreign policy interests of the whole state to be taken by a devolved executive and in the persona of MacAskill? The answer is that the clock was ticking in Edinburgh loudly enough for Whitehall to hear. Not the life-clock of Megrahi - who has demonstrated entirely predictable Ernest Saunders-like powers of recovery. But the clock ticking to Megrahi's appeal.

Whitehall realised they might never need their prisoner transfer agreement. at they could let MacAskill be the patsy. Thatat they could let Scotland take the blame for a release bound to cause outrage in the US, whose nationals were the overwhelming majority of those slaughtered by the bomb. So, who did conspire and execute mass murder over Lockerbie? I write this with trepidation but without any doubt that what I am saying is correct.

I am writing this from the Bekka valley in Lebanon. Back when the Pan Am jet exploded it was a heartland of Palestinian resistance groups, including Captain Ahmed Jabril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command. Next week I will be writing this column from the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Lockerbie atrocity was, I believe, carried about by Jabril's PFLP-GC and I believe the British and US governments have always known this. I believe it was ordered - and paid for - by a section of the then Iranian intelligence in retaliation for an equally atrocious act of mass murder. The USS Vincennes, a US warship stationed in the Persian Gulf, shot down with a ballistic missile a civillian airliner ying from Iran to Dubai. All the airline's crew and passengers were lost. The ship was there in support of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the final stages of the crazed war with Iran, which Saddam launched with the support of the US and UK.

Libya was a convenient scapegoat for Jabril's crime. It was the main international outcast at the time, and Gadda was referred to as the latest in a long line of "mad dogs", otherwise known as Arab leaders who stand up to the West. Evidence was fabricated, exculpatory evidence suppressed, witnesses suborned. Megrahi spent years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

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Here's Alex Salmond speaking on Newsnight tonight - I don't think he's a feartie in the slightest... he's pointing out that the American Senate has no fucking business to question the legal process in any other country. While I'm here, GG often states that he's not interested in Conspiracy Theories, but his approach to this story is pretty much that... but I'm glad to see it all the same...