Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi
From the Now-They-Tell-Us department comes the New York Times obit of Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted by a special Scottish court for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. After Megrahi's death from cancer was announced on Sunday, the Times finally acknowledged that his guilt was in serious doubt.
Last year, when the Times and other major U.S. news outlets were manufacturing public consent for a new war against another Middle East "bad guy," i.e. Muammar Gaddafi, Megrahi's guilt was treated as flat fact. Indeed, citation of the Lockerbie bombing became the debate closer, effectively silencing anyone who raised questions about U.S. involvement in another war for "regime change."
After all, who would "defend" the monsters involved in blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans? Again and again, the U.S.-backed military intervention to oust Gaddafi in 2011 was justified by Gaddafi's presumed authorship of the Lockerbie terrorist attack.
Only a few non-mainstream news outlets, like Consortiumnews.com, bothered to actually review the dubious evidence against Megrahi and raise questions about the judgment of the Scottish court that convicted Megrahi in 2001.
By contrast to those few skeptical articles, the New York Times stoked last year's war fever by suppressing or ignoring those doubts. For instance, one March 2011 article out of Washington began by stating: "There once was no American institution more hostile to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's's pariah government than the Central Intelligence Agency, which had lost its deputy Beirut station chief when Libyan intelligence operatives blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Scotland in 1988."
Note the lack of doubt or even attribution. A similar certainty prevailed in virtually all other mainstream news reports and commentaries, ranging from the right-wing media to the liberal MSNBC, whose foreign policy correspondent Andrea Mitchell would seal the deal by recalling that Libya had accepted "responsibility" for the bombing.
Gaddafi's eventual defeat, capture and grisly murder brought no fresh doubts about the certainty of the guilt of Megrahi, who was simply called the "Lockerbie bomber." Few eyebrows were raised even when British authorities released Libya's former intelligence chief Moussa Koussa after asking him some Lockerbie questions.
Scotland Yard also apparently failed to notice the dog not barking when the new pro-Western Libyan government took power and released no confirmation that Gaddafi's government indeed had sponsored the 1988 attack. After Gaddafi's overthrow and death, the Lockerbie issue just disappeared from the news.
A Surprising Obit
So, readers of the New York Times' obituary page might have been surprised Monday if they read deep into Megrahi's obit and discovered this summary of the case:
"The enigmatic Mr. Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist but defended by many Libyans, and even some world leaders, as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence."
If you read even further, you would find this more detailed examination of the evidence:
"Investigators, while they had no direct proof, believed that the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Flight 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner."After a three-year investigation, Mr. Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted on mass murder charges in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion. ...
"Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999: the suspects' surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.
"The trial lasted 85 days. None of the witnesses connected the suspects directly to the bomb. But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing that forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified Mr. Megrahi as the buyer, although Mr. Gauci seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.
"The bomb's timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.
"Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Mr. Fhimah's desk in Malta, that Mr. Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase, and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.
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