Charles Norrie

Charles Norrie
Member of	Justice for Megrahi
Interests	Pan Am Flight 103

Charles Norrie's "tale of three atrocities"

Charles Byard Norrie has spent the last two decades researching the Lockerbie bombing of 21 December 1988 after his brother Tony Norrie died onboard UTA Flight 772 that came down over the Sahara desert nine months later in similar circumstances.

Charles Norrie believes the Lockerbie bombing – which killed 270 people in Britain’s biggest terrorist attack – was master-minded and executed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi had nothing to do with the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103.

The results of Norrie's research were set out in August 2009 in a 126-page document entitled "A tale of three atrocities", which he condensed into a 32-page book with the same title and published on 21 December 2009, the twenty first anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing.

Justice for Megrahi

"A tale of three atrocities" Abstract

Charles Norrie's Timeline 1988-2009

Charles Norrie's Lockerbie Timeline

ATOTA page 5: Megrahi: An innocent incarcerated

ATOTA page 9: Who did Lockerbie?

ATOTA page 19: The investigation and framing Megrahi

ATOTA page 20: Planting the circuit board

ATOTA page 21: Media manipulation

In October 2010, Charles Norrie posed the question "Why does Professor Black post this message on his website"::

"Justice for Megrahi is a campaign that proceeds strictly on evidence. It has no evidence that the e-petitions website crash is attributable to malicious or criminal conduct. Anyone who thinks that he/she has such evidence should communicate it to the appropriate authorities"

Now, if you listen to the likes of Mr Richard Marquise whom actually Professor Black has never criticised, he would say "Read my lips - the evidence produced at the trial is full, complete and incontrovertible".

So why is Black saying that Justice for Megrahi cannot deal in speculation when to prosecutors and investigators everything on the JfM site is groundless speculation?

I believe Black has allowed his site to be contaminated by those who believe it is their duty to uphold the conviction against Mr Megrahi by infiltrating those who are fighting for justice. It is a technique of the intelligence services to penetrate oppositional groups and subtly pervert their ends. It can be done so carefully that the corruption is almost invisible, until you step back and take a look.

Unfortunately, the corruption extends to to the JfM site itself.

In each case a rather silly, histrionic woman of the Slim Virgin sort (good at blogging, with no moral scruples) has corrupted the aims of the JfM site's avowed intentions.

This is quite provable and I have collected the evidence, which is quite incontrovertible.

Deputy Secretary Dr Morag Kerr

On 22 May 2012, 'Justice for Megrahi' Deputy Secretary Dr Morag Kerr (also known as Soixante-neuf, Rolfe, Linda Mack and Slim Virgin) commented:

"If you've only read ONE conspiracy theory that you know is complete mince, you're extremely lucky. I've lost count.

"This is my all-time favourite: Charles Norrie's theory.

"Warning, if you try to make sense of it your brain will probably try to crawl out of your ears.

"Oh, and he thinks I'm Slim Virgin, which is the cherry on top, although Slim Virgin is actually a woman called Linda Mack who lives in Canada. That's not why I love it, though. I love it because it is so delightfully inventive."

"A tale of three atrocities"

On 21 December 2009, the 21st anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, with help from journalist/broadcaster John Coates, Charles Norrie published the results of his research into Iran Air Flight 655, Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772 in a report entitled "A tale of three atrocities" (ATOTA). Key arguments of the report:

• Lockerbie was carried out jointly by Iran and the CIA, as agreed revenge for the downing of an Iranian plane by the US Navy;
• All evidence against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi can be disproved and discounted;
• There was not one but two explosions on the plane, one carried out by Iran and one by the CIA;
• The CIA interfered with the scene of the crime directly after the attack, to the horror of Scottish investigators; and,
• The CIA were allowed to doctor and manipulate forensic evidence and interfere with the evidence stream in order to obtain their politically-desired outcome: a Libyan attribution.

The report will have legal ramifications for those that the author accuses of being involved. It also calls for Mr Megrahi's attempts to prove his innocence to be allowed to continue. Mr Norrie comments:

"Unlike the atrocity which killed my brother, Lockerbie has been wrongly attributed to Libya. Libya killed my brother - but they absolutely did not do Lockerbie. The extent to which the CIA have covered up their involvement in Lockerbie is extraordinary and complex, and I am excited, and indeed relieved, to be able to release my findings, now."

Intriguing issues

Charles Norrie found that a number of intriguing issues had been overlooked or unobserved:

Can I first take you through my telegraphic and abbreviated history, of that atrocity which we have come to call Lockerbie?

My first knowledge of Lockerbie and UTA Flight 772:

• 21 December 1988: I become aware of Lockerbie on Spanish television, for I am on holiday, touring. I learn an aircraft has crashed there with all lives and some on the ground, lost. In the past I had often passed through the little town – not a village.

• January 1989 to 19 September 1989: I don't follow Lockerbie much, as I have no connection with it, but I am aware that it has become Scotland's major terrorist investigation.

• 19 September 1989: my brother is killed on UT-772 and my life it completely transformed. Nothing is ever quite the same again. Nothing has been.

• 20 September 1989: Jim Swire invites UK relatives of UT-772 to contact him. I take up his invitation.

• November 1989: Still in the early days of UTA Flight 772, I make a trip to Lockerbie to meet the UKFF103 families, who have gathered there.

Juge Bruguière's conclusions

• 20 September 1990: The UTA families (technically the partie civiles) are told by Juge Jean-Louis Bruguière, the examining magistrate (investigator) into UT-772 that Congolese and Libyan elements are being sought over the atrocity.

• 21 September 1991: The Juge accuses 4 Libyan government officials of the destruction of UT-772 by a bomb. It is a timer bomb carried on board the aircraft by a Congolese mule who died unknowing of the contents of his baggage, technically different from what is known about the Pan Am Flight 103 device. I phone Jim Swire from a telephone box in Paris immediately after the announcement, and he says the suspects for UTA "are not on his radar for Pan Am 103.

I take that to mean that Libya will not be implicated in Pan Am 103.

• October 1991: The Juge brings formal charges against the four Libyans.

Lockerbie developments

• November 1991: Charges are brought against 2 Libyans over Lockerbie. To say that these charges came as a shock to Jim (and even to me) is an understatement.

• 1991-1998: The Lockerbie case largely goes to sleep

Developments in three cases

• early 1990s: France, the UK and US work together and bring in UN sanctions against Libya. I am told by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that this is the only official co-operation between the three countries over the two atrocities UT-772 and Pan Am 103.

• 1996: The French Juge adds two more names to this charge sheet over UT-772, closes his file and passes it to the Parquet of the Paris court of Grand Instance (Paris County Court Prosecutor).

• 1996: In a settlement with the Iranians the US pays Iran about $65million for the 290 lives lost on IR-655.

• 1997-9: The Libyans refuse to release 6 of their citizens for a trial in France and the French proceed with a trial in contumacy (in absentia), a process permitted by French law. In a three-day trial before a bench of about 15 judges the prosecution presents the equivalent of what would be the opening prosecution speech in an English court. Partie civile lawyers representing the relatives of the deceased passengers and crew and the airline company make their submissions. The six Libyans are sentenced to life imprisonment.

• 1999: The Libyans are forced by the threat of ever-increasing Western and UN sanctions to send the Lockerbie 2 for trial in a novel court, outside Scotland but using Scottish law and without a jury before a bench of three judges.

• 1999/2000: Just before the Lockerbie trial begins the defence produce their take on what will be the Crown's evidence, in a programme on UK TV station Channel 4, and it seems as pathetically thin as it had been when the charges were brought, nearly a decade earlier.

• 2000: The trial lasts nearly a year, and the Libyan two do not give evidence in their own defence, relying on a defence of incrimination. One of them is convicted (Megrahi), the other acquitted (Fhimah).

Many onlookers and observers think the evidence weak and conflicting. The forensic evidence seems thin and problematic.

Megrahi's first appeal

In February 2002, Mr Megrahi loses his first appeal. A new fact emerges however. There had undoubtedly been a break-in at Terminal 3, Heathrow at a door between landside and airside on the evening of 20th December 1988. Whilst we have not been told exactly when the door was firmly locked, we know that Ray Manly, a BAA security guard, found it broken into at 00.05am on the 21st December 1988. The hasp of the padlock had been cut "like butter" and the lock itself was lying next to the door. The Crown in opposing this evidence (in an appeal the Crown is essentially in a defensive position of its own prosecution theory) blustered on to Mr Manly that this broken padlock was had been caused by some rogue baggage loader breaking out from airside to landside to avoid the half-hour walk through the BAA's security barrier.

Notice how lame this explanation is. No one at the BAA security gate had been interviewed (or if they were interviewed, the evidence was never produced) to say if anyone had passed the BAA security point or not just before midnight, yet the existence of the presence of such a person would scupper what is beginning to look like a real break-in.

The lordships, now a bench of five not three remain unconvinced by this new fact. They claim that the break-in is too remote in time from the destruction of Pan Am 103 for there to be a connection.

Yet in the trial story (the one which the judges necessarily believe, if they believe Mr Megrahi to be guilty), the timer on the Lockerbie bomb must have been set around 08:00 (or at latest by the time the Air Malta flight from Luqa to Frankfurt on the morning of 21st December 1988.

That is a difference of an extra eight hours. Do you really believe that it would have been impossible for a timer device to have been chosen and used by Libyan security officer that was incapable of running for that extra time, which in any case was less than 24 hours, that a simple clock device could achieve?

In 1984, the PIRA blew up a bomb that had been placed in a space in the plumbing in a hotel, a full six weeks before the Tory party conference at Brighton. Are you seriously suggesting that if the PIRA was capable of that a full four years before Lockerbie, the Libyans would have been incapable of making a device required to run for only 18 hours in 1988. After all, one of the arguments that was put forward in other cases was that the Libyans were arming the PIRA.

Intellectual failure

Indeed this failure of the Appeal Court's thinking processes is even worse, and it combines three separate intellectual steps. Firstly there's the denial of the importance of the break-in. Then there's the evidence, put forward conclusively in my thesis that the bomb was not a timer bomb at all, but was a PFLP-GC type bomb or a mimic of it, and thirdly, by offering an alternative scenario to the accepted timer device, that was no longer an "Occam's razor argument", as there was an alternative and much more powerful one at hand in the break-in itself.

A tyro investigator who overlooked an explanation of the importance of the break-in, at the outset, would make little progress in his chosen career in the real world.

But in the chop logic topsy-turvy way of thinking of the Scottish Appeal Court a very real challenge to the accepted conclusion of the trial was faced with an impossible hurdle to overcome.

And so the appeal failed. No wonder Hans Köchler the UN observer was to doubt whether the Scottish courts indeed had a properly established appeal court at all.

The USA fines Libya, the French reach an agreed deal.

To return to the basic time line. The Lockerbie appeal having failed and the conviction of one man permit the US to "fine" in 2003 the Libyan regime $2.7 billion for the 270 lives lost.

This indeed was the real reason why the Libyan regime had been so brutally treated.

• 2004: The French families reach a much smaller settlement with the Libyans of $170million for the 170 lives lost.

• 2006: The relatives of the seven US citizens killed on UT-772 share and award of $6billion in a default judgement in the US Federal (Eastern District) courts.

• 2007: The SCCRC reports on its inquiry into the conviction of Mr Megrahi and on six grounds sends the case back for a second appeal.

Scots release Mr Megrahi

• 2009: In complicated circumstances, the Scots release Mr Megrahi who on the Scots side is said to be suffering from advanced prostate cancer back to Libya to die.

• 2010: Mr Megrahi's failure to die causes promoters of "Megrahi is guilty" (largely the supporters of VPAF103, and the US Senate, who have always regarded the Lockerbie trial as a neat piece of political theatre designed to get a foregone guilty verdict) to claim he is not suffering from prostate cancer, and should be returned to jail in Scotland.

Privately, I think in their hearts the Scottish prosecutors know that if only 10% of the claims of the fudging, lying, fakery and fraud of the official theory of the prosecution are true, the Scottish judicial process is in a very bad way, and completely broke.

Unfortunately so much of the evidence is fraudulent or misleading that the very functioning of the Scottish court system has been imperilled.

Like cowards, the Scottish judicial system then hides behind their political masters and expects them to take the flak. Enough of the timeline.

My solution

I have been involved in researching Lockerbie for over 20 years. My solution has developed over those years and now is a comprehensive take on many aspects of the atrocity, some of which are frequently ignored or overlooked, but are necessarily in the public record.

Indeed almost all of the facts I use are in the public record. Some, though frequently overlooked, are highly significant.

Thus, I think it very important that the Iranian foreign minister said, possibly as an aside, at a conference in Beirut, Lebanon, three days before the Lockerbie atrocity that the downing of the Iranian Airbus, IR-655, was shortly to be avenged.

I have also permitted myself, in contradistinction to almost every other commentator to interpolate the gaps in the evidence.

For example, Mr McKee's suitcase was quickly found on those winter Lockerbie hills, recovered, taken to the interim investigation HQ, and then returned by Scottish detectives to the location it had been found. How had it been found, and why? I put forward a reasoned and reasonable account of how it came to be found, which, nevertheless because it has not been confirmed by the CIA, who caused it to be found, is treated as mere speculation and a conspiracy theory in its own right.

The key issues I have come to a reasoned explanation of are:

The reason for the meetings between US and Iranian negotiators in Switzerland from August to November 1988

• The Toshiba warnings

• The Helsinki warning

• The Terminal 3 Heathrow break in of 20 December 1988, just before midnight

• The reason why the account of the destruction of Pan Am 103 in the AAIB report is so unsatisfactory, misleading, but not factually inaccurate

• The matter of Mr McKee's suitcase

• The date and location of the fraudulent intervention with the MEBO chip evidence

• The impossibility of the Toshiba chip evidence

• The misinterpretation of the Horton Toshiba manual finding

• The reasonable interpretation of Mr Paul Channon's statement, a question prompted by the UK Pan Am 103 relatives

• The real reason why Mr Fhimah apparently wrote the word "taggs" (note spelling) in his Arabic diary

• The proper understanding of the story of Mr Behbahani, an Iranian national, partially recounted by Mr Marquise and also by Mr Baer's television team

• An overall explanation about what the destruction of Pan Am 103 is about.

I ask anyone who decides to read this material, to undertake to read it as a whole and then settle back and formulate a measured response and not take single issues at random, saying "this is impossible", or "I don't believe that".

I think I have thought about many of the reservations that you may have on my theory (I think I have probably spent more hours than you considering it) – and it is not an issue of this essay to say whether I have been wasting my life or not. I have chosen to use it this way.

Thus I shall tend to disregard arguments that do not take a wholesale account of my views, rather than sniping.

One memorable encounter I had was with a blogger who said the CIA did not have portable radars! Really! Mobile radar, aircraft flyable, first used on 30 January 1943. I may not know what kit is available today, but it is reasonable to assume a hand held device is available today. I understand that the man carry-able atomic weapon has been around for more than 50 years (WS 54 of 1961 – 1962).

And also arguments along the lines that a US agency is morally incapable of such a crime. Or even the US Government.

Publicising my views

This has been as difficult as the research. Having spent so long on my particular trail, I assumed that dozens of researchers would be racing to the finishing line.

There was no competition. I was in a race of one. As one BBC journalist put it: "if my name were Seymour Hersh, I would have no problem in publishing you, but since it isn't, I can't help you".

My point is that if my name were Mr Hersh, this story would be the last thing I would be allowed to publish about the CIA. Mr Hersh is allowed to make safe disclosures about what the CIA has done, and woe betide him if he goes too far. A licensed jester.

The truth of Lockerbie is amongst the CIA's most precious Crown jewels.

One national broadsheet has expressed interest, but not until Mr Megrahi dies, though I don't think his death has anything to do with his guilt or not. A tabloid has shown some flicker, but probably declined on the sheer complexity of the matter.

Understanding Lockerbie is not easy!

So I put the theory on the internet.

On the internet

You can find my short piece here. As of 11 October 2010, it was still there.

There were few takers so...

I rather foolishly allowed myself to join a forum called Randi (immensely hilarious to anyone in the UK). While there, I got a lot of publicity - my profile rising in intensity by about 18 times. However, most of the response was from rather ignorant bloggers who took either a position of disbelief (conspiracy theory), or nit picked on their own special interest.

I also did not understand their complex and not stated rules on quoting, which ended up with them banning me.

I did not really care whether I was or not..

What was interesting was that almost immediately after my "hit" rate dropped from 1310 to about 68, followed for some reason by a return to now 1440. Why, Randi?

On Wikipedia

On the Wikipedia in English:

I approached this very carefully. I established that there was a page in the Wikipedia entitled "Flight Pan Am 103 conspiracy theories".

Now this is highly unusual. There isn't a Wikipedia page on conspiracy theories for most of the 3.5million articles in the English Wikipedia. Take a subject like the "Victoria Line" and you will not find one.

There is a general reference page to conspiracy theories, which has 76 external references. So the number of issues the Wikipedia thinks there may be conspiracy theories about is tiny say one in 400,000.

Pan Am Flight 103 is one of them. If you go to that page you will find that there are eight recognised (conspiracy) theories. Only 2 of them mention Iran, one in connection with a bomb loaded through Frankfurt, the other through London.

Though the CIA as perpetrator is mentioned in one theory, in connection with drug smuggling, the US government is never mentioned at all.

In particular a theory that includes malfeasance and criminality by the US and Iran governments jointly is entirely absent.

Why? If you have not by now read my little theory, please do so now.

A conspiracy theory?

When the term conspiracy theory was coined, it had a neutral meaning. Sometime during the 1980s, the phrase acquired a negative meaning - "Touch this sort of thought with a bargepole, and then wipe your hands, it seemed to say."

Conspiracy theories were the sort of idea no rational person would consider. That one theory, of an event - "the official story" - was something to be believed was a necessary commitment of such argument.

Early on in the UTA saga, no less, I was warned never to trust anything in a newspaper, by the FCO. That might have been sensible advice, but news never came from the Ministry and what there was had to be forced from them, often in hot and unreasoning argument. Then they'd turn round and and consent to whatever you claimed, before finding another little patch of mud to get themselves stuck in.

Yet journalists are punctilious to themselves in ensuring they can back up a story. Journalist and government official live together in a symbiotic embrace in any Western developed country that does not solely rely on government propaganda diktat.

So what as a theory that was not mentioned.

The unmentionable theory

It was just possible, though I thought it unlikely, that the possibility that Iran and the US had conspired together had been missed by everyone, but me. I thought is most unlikely but the way to work it out was quite simple.

I would introduce amendments into the Lockerbie story as carried in the Wikipedia and see what happened to them. Would they stay or would they go?

For the first minimal amendment, I chose a Wikipedia page not directly relating to Lockerbie, but mentioning it, and made the minimal possible change. It survived.

I then went to the Wikipedia conspiracy page for Pan Am 103 and made a short but not direct reference to a Iran/US attribution. The response was astonishing and took only half an hour in coming. A Mr Bert Strossberg reverted the copy, saying inter alia the theory was unnotable. Now the value of a conspiracy theory is not that it is unnotable, which is not a word in my dictionary, and I infer its meaning (leave that by the way), but whether it is right or wrong.

And if it was wrong (remember we're dealing with the traditional meaning of "conspiracy theory") that it is wrong, why bother to revert it? And if it is unnotable, why also, for no-one need take any notice of it.

But my claim being a claimed unnotable conspiracy theory was reverted. Why? It made no sense.

To my perverse view that someone should revert it (suppress) on the grounds it was unnotable and a conspiracy theory MEANT IT WAS TRUE (sorry about the overemphasis).

And who was Mr Bert Strossberg? He was submitting from a site that gave a IP address of a water company in Connecticut, USA, not far from the US Government political badlands. Further enquiry revealed that the gent almost certainly was the man who ran a victims' support website for KAL-007. Now this is interesting for KAL-007 is cited in the Wikipedia as having conspiracy theories attached to it! The short entry in the KAL-007 entry reads: "Flight 007 has been the subject of ongoing controversy and has spawned a number of conspiracy theories, many of which are rooted in Cold War disinformation and propaganda campaigns, the suppression of evidence such as the flight data recorders and unexplained details such as the role of a USAF RC-135 surveillance aircraft."

Notice how dismissive the statement is of any rationale that says the flight data recorders and the role of the USAF RC-135 surveillance aircraft might have a genuine import.

The modus operandi of the CIA appears to be: hide and conceal, bluster and deny, and bluster again, when up against it. But never ever confess your critics might just be right. It doesn't really matter how thin your lie becomes, because the "country stock", of US government and CIA boosters will emerge on cue to hold up the shabby edifice of untruth.

This is what they were doing over Pan Am 103. I tried a number of other changes. The editors (whether CIA or Wikipedia) did not like a claim about UFOs, though indeed I had been approached by a man in the gents at the Russell Hotel to say UFOs were involved in Lockerbie.

If you think my ideas nonsense, at least it is a grounded nonsense.

I tried a long translation of a claim in Hungarian and a shorter one in Czech. They both were reverted.

What do I do next?

This is the matter that interests me now. If I keep putting a clear and referenced claim in the Wikipedia, I think I am entitled to claim, but my claim is referenced (as it is), so you can't claim it is unnotable (whatever than means).

We can go to edit wars and get a high level editor involved. And SlimVirgin, I know who you are and your sockpuppets, too.

But at the moment this is a war I am winning.

Charles Norrie

A Different View on Lockerbie

From: "A tale of three atrocities" - sometimes called the Green ATOTA from the colour of its cover.

This report, released on the anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, offers a new perspective on what happened on Pan Am Flight 103 when it exploded over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie 21 years ago.

The work of Lockerbie researcher Charles Norrie, it jointly accuses Iran and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the 1988 bombing, which killed 270 people, including passengers, crew and those on the ground. The report accuses Iran of planting a bomb onto Flight 103, and accuses the CIA of authorising, facilitating, and assisting with the plot, including the planting of a second 'insurance' bomb.

The author has been researching the Lockerbie disaster since his brother was killed in a similar attack over Africa, the bombing of UTA Flight 772 in 1989, which has also been attributed to Libya. This report is a result of almost twenty years of research, during which time Norrie has painstakingly analysed official reports into the bombing and has also had personal contact with some of those involved with both tragedies.

Personal message

On 19th September 1989, my brother Tony was murdered in a Libyan terrorist attack. He was travelling on UTA Flight 772 between N'Djamena in Chad, where he worked in oil field development, and Paris. When he died, he was returning to the UK via Paris to participate in a gliding competition in Scotland. He lived for gliding and loved the air. He had even represented Guernsey at the 1982 World Gliding Championships. The latter seems an odd achievement because I didn't know he had a connection to the place. So it was a tragic irony that he should meet his death in the beastly destruction of an aircraft. I like to think he was sitting back with a gin and tonic in his hand just before he died. Perhaps he was thinking of pleasant air adventures ahead.

My brother was a long-standing member of Lasham Gliding Club, near Alton in Hampshire. His life was centred on the airfield and close friends living in and near the town who were devoted to the sport. He repaid that friendship in his will, leaving them sufficient money to build a workshop at the airfield. The Club has named the workshop in his memory. They also established a "Tony Norrie" award for the best two-seater flight of the year. These people, to my mind, constituted his "gliding family". To them, I had to bring the sad news of his tragic death. My brother and I were never close. However, when he died, I found he had made me his executor. I asked my mother "Why?". "Because you always have the last word in any argument," she said enigmatically.

I metaphorically extended the remit of executor to inquire about the circumstances of any tragedy that could have a bearing on his death. So, I settled down to read myself into Lockerbie. Like UTA, Lockerbie was to be attributed to Libya.

With that thought in mind, I offer these thoughts on Lockerbie twenty years later. The conclusions of my research are shocking. They are also wildly different from anything previously published. Given what Libya did to my brother, my stance may surprise you.

Charles Norrie norriecb(at)gmail.com

What's in this report?

"A tale of three atrocities" Contents page

• Abstract (1)
• A personal message (3)
• Megrahi: An innocent incarcerated (5)
• Introduction (5)
• Limited evidence (7)
• The timer chip (7)
• The Giaka story (8)
• Loading the plane (8)
• Who did Lockerbie? (9)
• Introduction (9)
• Why Iran wanted to down a plane (9)
• Why the US had to help (10)
• How the plot was formed (10)
• The Swiss agreement (11)
• Where and when (11)
• How Iran and the CIA caused Lockerbie (12)
• The Helsinki Warning (12)
• The blame (13)
• Deadly cargo to London (13)
• The Heathrow break-in (13)
• The first explosion (17)
• The second explosion (18)
• The investigation and framing Megrahi (21)
• The Toshiba manua (21)
• Suitcase? - suitcases!(21)
• Planting the circuit board (23)
• Media manipulation (23)
• Arranging some trial witnesses (24)
• What next? (25)
• Cast of characters (26)

Lockerbie 'Conspiracy'

(E-mail from Mr Charles Norrie, 20 September 2011)

As a reader of the works of that much neglected detective story writer, R Austin Freeman, I came across the following in "Dr Thorndyke Intervenes":

"It was originally proposed to charge him and Gimbler together with conspiracy. But there is this awkward peculiarity about an indictment for conspiracy in which only two persons are involved; if one of them is acquitted, the other is acquitted automatically. For a conspiracy is like a quarrel; it can't be a single-handed job. A man can't conspire with himself. So if, of two alleged conspirators, one is found innocent, it follows that there was no conspiracy, and the other man must be innocent, too."

Now, these are exactly the circumstances of the Lockerbie two and, up until the last moment it went to the judges as jury, it was a pure conspiracy. But the Crown realised that this would not be worn by the judges (were they alerted?) and proceeded to replace the charge with a single one against Mr Megrahi. Mr Fhimah did not walk free though until his defence lawyer Richard Keen asked the judges for his liberty.

Shabby, shabby trial, with a shabby, shabby outcome. It stinks!

Charles Norrie <norriecb(at)gmail.com>

'Lockerbie Bomber' Farce

(E-mail from Mr Charles Norrie, 8 August 2011)

ATOTA page 23: What next?

Twenty years ago, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was so wicked that ordinary life in Libya was bought to a standstill: it was blockaded, impounded and sanctioned until poor Mr Megrahi was expelled against Libya's will, his will and international law to face a trial, which let's face it, was a shoddy travesty of justice. Which did not pass muster in the league of international trials, in which the judges were the same people as the jury, and this farce was allowed to proceed in the full majesty of Scottish law.

Eleven years ago, the extracted Megrahi was proceeded against with all the solemn dignity that a Scottish Court - albeit sitting in the Netherlands - is capable of, and duly found guilty on the most dubious, faked and contrived evidence.

By the time the first appeal took place in 2002 their Lordships, with their comic Ruritanian titles, had forgotten themselves as to the belief that Mr Megrahi's guilt was beyond reasonable doubt. Now it was only on a balance of probabilities. He stayed in the slammer.

Having fined Libya and reduced it to penury and the Libyan nuclear threat, no more than an Aladdin's lamp of a thing, had slipped under the sands of the desert, the country was very ungraciously rehabilitated.

In 2009, Megrahi had the good luck to get ill precisely at the time the farce of his conviction was to return to the Scottish Appeal Court, who though not the finest scourges of prosecutorial wrongdoing were to be faced with a heap of stinking commission, admission, lies and fabrications. His Appeal promised to sweep away the whole of the Edinburgh legal gerontocracy.

So they let him go in August 2009.

Now the US Congress is at the best of times a bunch of fantastists and when presented with the continuing farce of the Lockerbie process some of its dimmest members (especially Senators Lautenberg and Menendez) sought to maintain the fallacy of Megrahi's guilt. For they are fine operators who know an oleaginous word about the suffering of the Pan Am 103 victims' relatives will outweigh any logically constructed criticism, especially when they are too stupid to know a fact from a falsehood.

So the Yanks called for him to be returned to jail in Scotland and if the Scots refuse (let's boycott them then for they're only limeys in kilts and nothing like as important as a raw-blooded US constituent from some gerrymandered district), invade Libya with the notorious US Navy seals, mythical beasts of great strength and no known purpose or intelligence, and take Megrahi back to learn what a real prison sentence is like in the land of the free. Or put him on trial, counter to international law, which of course is outranked by the fabled and derided US Constitution.

London demurs. Having permitted the Americans to play fast and loose with evidence, Scottish courts, truth, international relations and God knows what else, FCO Minister Lord Howell has a fit of squeamishness: we don't want Megrahi back, even if he's now fit enough to participate in the London Olympics. He's a convicted criminal and cannot be allowed to sully UK soil again!

Do I weep or laugh?

Charles Norrie <norriecb(at)gmail.com> (The author has been affected by what is loosely called Libyan terror, unlike those people who lost relatives at Lockerbie. His brother was killed on UTA Flight 772 of 19 September 1989, an atrocity that has been blamed on Libya.)

 

A Document by Charles Norrie

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
File:A Tale of Three Atrocities.pdf	report	August 2009	Pan Am Flight 103 Iran Air Flight 655 UTA Flight 772	The report suggests that three ostensibly unconnected flight sabotages may in fact be connected. The main focus is the Pan American Airlines Flight 103, downed over Lockerbie in December 1988. It suggested that the CIA facilitated the Lockerbie atrocity by Iranian operatives as a quid-pro-quo for the downing of the Iranian airliner some 5 months earlier.

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