As historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article after Megrahi's 2001 conviction, "The case for the suitcase's hypothetical travels must also deal with the fact that, according to Air Malta, all the documented luggage on KM180 was collected by passengers in Frankfurt and did not continue in transit to London, and that two Pan Am on-duty officials in Frankfurt testified that no unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am 103A, the feeder flight to London."
Plus, there were problems with Gauci's belated identification of Megrahi as the shirt-buyer a decade after the fact. Gauci had made contradictory IDs and had earlier given a physical description that didn't match Megrahi.
Gauci also reportedly received a $2 million reward for his testimony and then moved to Australia, where he went into retirement.
In 2007, the Scottish review panel decided to reconsider Megrahi's conviction after concluding that Gauci's testimony was unbelievable. And without Gauci's testimony, the case against Megrahi was virtually the same as the case against his co-defendant who was acquitted.
Nevertheless, Megrahi's conviction did assuage the understandable human desire to see someone punished for such a heinous crime, albeit a possibly innocent man. The original accusations against him in the early 1990s also fit with the geopolitical interests of powerful figures in Washington and London.
Megrahi's conviction allowed more international pressure to be put on Libya, which was then regarded as the archetypal "rogue" state. Indeed, it was to get those onerous economic sanctions lifted that Libya took "responsibility" for the Pan Am attack even as Libyan officials continued to deny having anything to do with it.
Flat Facts
Yet, despite all these reasonable doubts, the U.S. news media continues to treat Libya's guilt in the Pan Am case as a flat fact.
For instance, the New York Times led an article on Friday about the CIA's mixed attitudes toward Libya by noting that the CIA's deputy station chief in Beirut was killed "when Libyan intelligence operatives blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Scotland in 1988."
One has to assume that if the Times didn't have an anti-Gaddafi bias, the article would at least have thrown in an "allegedly" or a "believed to have" -- or a "disputed," a word the Times and other U.S. news outlets routinely use when dealing, in the opposite way, with another Muslim "designated villain," Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Whenever an American news organization refers to Ahmadinejad's 2009 reelection, the word "disputed" is almost always included, if not stronger language like "stolen" or "rigged." Although it's technically true that the election was "disputed," no credible evidence has been presented to prove that Ahmadinejad used fraud to win.
In fact, the evidence goes the other way. Though widely ignored by the major American news media, a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found little evidence to support allegations of fraud or to conclude that most Iranians view Ahmadinejad as illegitimate.
PIPA analyzed multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different sources, including some before the June 12, 2009, election and some afterwards. The study found that in all the polls, a majority said they planned to vote for Ahmadinejad or had voted for him. The numbers ranged from 52 to 57 percent just before the election to 55 to 66 percent after the election.
"These findings do not prove that there were no irregularities in the election process," said Steven Kull, director of PIPA. "But they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad."
An analysis by former U.S. national security officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett reached a similar conclusion. They found that the "personal political agendas" of American commentators caused them to side with the anti-Ahmadinejad protesters who sought to overturn the election results. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How US Media Botched Iran's Election."]
Among those biased American journalists on assignment in Iran in 2009 was Times executive editor Keller, one of the "liberal hawks" on Iraq. He coauthored a "news analysis" that opened with an old joke about Ahmadinejad looking into a mirror and saying "male lice to the right, female lice to the left," disparaging both his Islamic conservatism and his rise from the street.
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