Conspiracy Praxis: Lockerbie

From today's Observer. (The priceless reference to "conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists" in the last paragraph speaks volumes about the current state of journalism.)

Vital Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with'

Fragments of bomb timer that helped to convict a Libyan ex-agent were 'practically carbonised' before the trial, says bankrupt Swiss businessman

Alex Duval Smith, Europe correspondent

Sunday September 2, 2007

The Observer

The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.

Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy [sic!] investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.

The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air. Britain and theUS blamed Libya, saying that its leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.

He is currently serving his sentence in Greenock prison, but later this month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi's case, after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in June that there was enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert's confession, which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will strengthen Megrahi's appeal.

The Zurich-based Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two decades trying to clear his company's name, is as eager for the appeal as is Megrahi. Bollier's now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of it had been found on a Scottish hillside.

Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. 'Two years before Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.'

However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and asked to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and travelled to Dumfries to see the evidence.

'I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.'

Back in Switzerland, Bollier's company was in effect bankrupt, having faced a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.

In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. 'I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them in Dumfries.
'
Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last month, when Lumpert, one of his former employees, walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2160655,00.html

What's wrong with 'lenin'? Ask Francis Boyle.

'lenin' informs us that he's going to be presenting his thoughts at the Marxism 2007 conference, which starts tomorrow. Title of his paper: "'What's Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?"

What's wrong with 'lenin' is that he is still cheerfully deploying this thoughtstopper, without once stopping to ask himself who gave him it, or what it's actually for, and who else uses it, and why. No doubt 'lenin' has his reasons; it's just a little strange that he never explains them. Perhaps his next paper will be entitled "What's wrong with Islamofascism?", or "What's Wrong With Political Correctness?" No need to distance himself with quotemarks or anything. Words are innocent, after all. You can just pick them up and use them as you find them. Right, 'lenin'?

Francis Boyle would most certainly disagree. As would Jamey Hecht:

THE TERM ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’

This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category.

So why is 'lenin' still riding that allegedly tireless workhorse? Everyone else can see that it's ripe for the knacker's yard.

************************************************************************************

UPDATE THURSDAY: BREAKING NEWS -

Australia admits oil motive in Iraq

AlJazeera, THURSDAY, JULY 05, 2007

Australia has admitted for the first time that securing the supply of oil is a key motive for its involvement in the US-led war in Iraq.

Brendan Nelson, the defence minister, said "energy security" was one of the main priorities behind his country's support for the war, which is unpopular among Australians.

HISTORICAL NOTE:
Blair: Iraq oil claim is 'conspiracy theory'

Guardian, Wednesday January 15, 2003

Tony Blair today derided as "conspiracy theories" accusations that a war on Iraq would be in pursuit of oil, as he faced down growing discontent in parliament at a meeting of Labour backbenchers and at PMQs.

"Derided"? Aha. And note that Blair achieved that derision without using a single adjective. If he'd said (for example) "a ridiculous conspiracy theory", then it would have been a tautology. The compound noun itself is already a term of derision; a loaded term, not quite as innocent as 'lenin' pretends it is. Now, it's not surprising that the Vicar of Downing Street would reach for that trusty loaded weapon when under fire himself. But why is 'lenin' waving it around, like a three-year-old with a hand-grenade? Maybe he can tell us. He doesn't have to explain whose interests he serves in deploying it.

(Of course, it's always possible that Britain and Australia are in Iraq for different reasons: the Aussies for the oil, the Brits as humanitarians or archaeologists or sun-worshippers or something. Just as it's always possible, though sadly unlikely, that the left will finally, belatedly, grow up.)

Prof. Francis Boyle: 2001 anthrax attacks were a covered-up inside job

From After Downing Street.org, Tue, 2007-07-03:

Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out

[...] Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by PresidentGeorge H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job, Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School. Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the sporesused in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that therewas a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and thePentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award byFBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of theattempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that mostmembers of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law toall Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that, under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant. [...]

--full text here.

For Lenin's Tomb: 9/11 and "the territory of the aggressor"

Andreas Hauss writes:

In a Spin: the German Federal Constitutional Court

Dear Reader,

Germany's highest court has just passed down its ruling on the deployment of German Tornado jets abroad [it's permitted]. But what on earth do they mean by "the territory of the aggressor" ? Hm? The USA? Germany? Iraq? Or even... Afghanistan?

Yes, indeed: Afghanistan! We are defending ourselves. Afghanistan was the aggressor - and is, it seems, still aggressing away right now.

A tornado can easily knock some screws loose.

The Tale of Evil Osama, who attacked NATO from his cave in Tora Bora on September 11th, has still never been proven to be true; and it is now providing the basis for an unacceptable legal ruling.

TWO purely political consequences:

1. The left is going to have to address the issue of 9/11, whether it wants to or not.

2. When NATO's contractual and legal foundations can be twisted to suit any purpose, by means of garbled Arabian Nights fairy tales and plain lies, then Germany must leave NATO. (The Original Sin was Yugoslavia in 1999.)

Anyone who accepts lies as the implicit basis of a transaction will eventually be dragged across the desk and led by the nose round a circus ring. The left must, finally, grow up.

-- by Andreas Hauss at medienanalyse-international.de (Freely translated from the German.)

Aggressors

Dr. Francis A. Boyle and the Anthrax Attacks

The now long-forgotten anthrax attacks on Senators Daschle and Leahy were a vitally-important early battle in the soon-to-be-global War on Terror. Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois has now, quite bravely, stated the obvious; so wait for David Corn, Alexander Cockburn and the denizens of Lenin's Tomb to call him a 'conspiracy nut' - or else, more likely, to ignore him very carefully. Such is the "antiwar" "left" in December 2006.

Anthrax attack on US Congress made by scientists and covered up by FBI, expert says

Sherwood Ross

Middle East Times
December 11, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The terrorists who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely were US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab having access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, an eminent authority on the subject says.

Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.

This action makes it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.

Boyle, who drafted the US Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 enacted by Congress, said destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."

If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and US laws, Boyle said.

"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government biowarfare program," Boyle said.

The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and shut down the operations of the US Congress.

Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.

In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.

Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th Al Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."

A self-confessed Al Qaeda operative, Moussaoui was detained on immigration three weeks before 9/11 when a Minnesota flight school reported he was acting suspiciously.

Boyle asked if Bowman received an FBI award in December 2002, for "exceptional performance" because of his capacity "to forestall investigations, because of where they may lead?" He went on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?"

Because of its "bogus investigation," Boyle said, "the greatest political crime in the history of the United States of America since its founding on 4 July, 1776 - the anthrax attacks on Congress, which served not only to deliver a terrorist threat on its members, but actually to close it down for a period - may remain officially
unresolved forever."

"Could it truly be coincidental," he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?"

Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. He recently said President George W. Bush should be "terrified" that he will be the new Chair.

Boyle's views are contained in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism, published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, GA. His previously published titles include, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Destroying World Order. Dr. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.

In a foreword to the book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said the government's "growing bioterror programs [described by Professor Boyle] represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."

A harsh critic of Pentagon biowarfare activities, Boyle pointed out in inflation-adjusted dollars the US spends more on them today than it did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in World War II. He has accused the Bush administration of diverting the bio-tech industry "towards biowarfare purposes" and of making corrupting payoffs to Academia to turn university scientists to the pursuit of biowarfare work.

Sherwood Ross is an American journalist who writes on military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

The Testing of Lenin

Well, well: 'lenin' has now gone and banned me. Was that bravely done?

Whatever it was, it's certainly a very low comedy he's staging there. And brave or cowardly, it's all he can come up with. Having run out of evasive strategies on the Unwelcome Topic of 9/11, 'lenin' has now very quickly run out of arguments. This is not surprising, as the very best he had to offer in defence of the Bush Gang's cover-story was the 'evidence' tortured out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by the CIA and subsequently presented at the farcical 'trial' of Mounir al-Motassadeq in Hamburg.

Robbed of such shabby props, 'lenin' knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on. In mentioning his infirmity, I was committing the inexcusable crime of lèse majesté. Therefore, I had to go.

Lenin''s attitude is in fact more papal than kingly: urbi et orbi, from the heights of his Tomb, he can now spout endlessly dishonest fatuities about what he calls 'conspiracy theories', secure in the knowledge that he won't have to suffer any back-talk from me. He concludes his latest bull with this false but comforting thought:

"there is usually little we can do about any putative conspiracy beyond strengthening our class and making sure it is capable of minimising the effects of such activities."

"Our" class? Of course, he means his class: the chinrubbing, arse-covering clerical class. And presumably 'lenin''s class will "minimise the effects of such activities" in precisely the same way it is minimising them now: namely, not at all. On the contrary.

Low comedy. Still, not to worry; on the comments threads here and here, paul, milosevic, Peter Blapps, Tuppenceworth and many others (including a fellow-qlipoth) demonstrate that there will be back-talk enough. As 'lenin' huffs and puffs and blows his own house down, it's becoming ever more obvious that he and the rest of the 9/11Falsers are running out of steam. On the entire issue of 9/11, 'lenin''s performance (like Alexander Cockburn's and David Corn's) has been - and is - a moral and intellectual disgrace. No-one can take such stuff seriously anymore. Of course 'lenin' knows this too. His vanity is at stake, hence his viciousness.

In other news, the 'War' on 'Terror' proceeds apace, its major premise still unquestioned by the Prudently Harmless Left. (With an "antiwar movement" like lenin's, who needs a pro-war movement?)

- Here is the post he refused to print:

Steffaction, Good point. It's like having video footage of a fella murdering all of his neighbours, but spending all your time and energy wondering about whether he slapped his wife on his way out to do it.
ant 25 Nov, 16:30 #

No, ant; it's not. It's about having an underinformed and TV-addicted population that's traditionally indifferent to the low-cost killing of foreigners in Panama or Nicaragua - and then galvanising them by demonstrating that Evil Omnipresent Foreigners can actually kill them in their thousands, any time and without warning. ("The bastards snuck up and struck us in the Homeland!")

And the point of showing Americans that spectacle is so that they won't get too stroppy even if the War on Muslims costs them trillions, requires a load of dead "Boys", robs them of their civil liberties, and lasts forever.

As it is doing, more than five years on, with no end in sight.

- warszawa

The Stench from Lenin's Tomb

We are informed that 'Al Qaeda is misunderstood'.

Observe the comments under that post at Lenin's Tomb.

Observe lenin's helplessness. Observe his huffiness. Observe his increasingly incoherent rage. Observe his bloviating, de haut en bas (but not from a very great height). Observe how he resorts to playground namecalling. Observe how he evades and evades and evades. Observe how little support he gets, even from the regulars. Observe how he welcomes the foul-mouthed adulation of his notoriously stupid Pet Troll, one 'Patrick', aka a thousand imbecilic pseudonyms.

Observe what lenin eventually presents as his reply (finally, finally, at long last...) to the very simplest of questions:

Where is the evidence that 'Al Qaeda' dunnit? ('It' being The Crime That Made Us All Americans.)

His reluctant and belated response is utterly inexcusable. Here, for example, is the fifth piece of 'evidence' he adduces:

"Number five is the evidence presented in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, from KSM himself. This evidence cleared Moussaoui (precisely as bin Laden would later do in a video address), but it did acknowledge an AQ plot and identify a number of actors in it."

"Evidence"? Is lenin joking? This is how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - if he is indeed even in American custody - came to give that "evidence". And Moussaoui's 'trial' was (is) one of the most shameful legal travesties to have taken place in Germany in the last 61 years.

What's really sickening is that lenin knows all this perfectly well. He certainly knows about KSM's 'waterboarding', because I told him all about it quite recently. But perhaps lenin has succeeding in forgetting. (It wouldn't be for want of trying.) At any rate, lenin is not the only person in the world who has to be tortured before he will cough up any 'evidence'.

And who extracted that 'evidence'? And how much is that 'evidence' worth?

These are lenin's trusted sources.

- I will complete this post tomorrow. It is nearly 2:00 a.m. here and I have to be up in five hours; so for now I'll leave it to others to point out the other egregious logical and factual errors in lenin's ignominious screed. It is, naturally, entirely unlinked. To put it politely: lenin got his 'evidence' from the White House, via the Guardian and the telly. In plain English: he is pulling that 'evidence' out of his arse. Five years on, there is simply no excuse for it.

Lenin's Tomb badly needs airing. The stench it emits is the stench of chronic dishonesty, wilful ignorance and profound moral cowardice. It is also the sweet stink of too many corpses to count.