While this MAY be big news, this report pretty much only portrays the defense side of things:
EVIDENCE used against Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, was subject to deliberate destruction and manipulation for political reasons, according to leaked documents from his defence team.
The allegations suggest authorities on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to mislead the original inquiry into the 1988 disaster to divert attention away from the original Iranian-backed suspects to Libya, with evidence apparently tampered with, destroyed and overlooked.
In a decision that could send shockwaves through the Scottish legal system, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) is expected to conclude this week that the conviction of Megrahi – jailed in 2001 for his part in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 which killed 270 people – is unsafe.
Amid claims from his defence team of a "co-ordinated effort to mislead the court", tantamount to a perversion of the course of justice, the SCCRC is studying hundreds of documents and photographs that suggest evidence was deliberately fabricated, manipulated or ignored by police and CIA operatives.
Megrahi’s team believes the evidence was manipulated to avoid antagonising Iran at the time of the first Gulf War.
And while it’s a bit too early to jump on this bandwagon, knowing what we know now about the CIA would any of this surprise anyone?
Meanwhile Joshua Muravchik points out how the new improved Iranian regime has conducted itself in the region:
Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war, involving more states–Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others–is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.
Consider the pell-mell events of recent weeks. Iran imprisons four Americans on absurd charges only weeks after seizing 15 British sailors on the high seas. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is caught delivering weapons to the Taliban and explosives to Iraqi terrorists. A car bomb in Lebanon is used to assassinate parliament member Walid Eido, killing nine others and wounding 11 more.
At the same time, Fatah al-Islam, a shady group linked to Syria, launches an attack on the Lebanese army from within a Palestinian refugee area, beheading several soldiers. Tehran trumpets further progress on nuclear enrichment as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats his call for annihilating Israel, crowing that "the countdown to the destruction of this regime has begun." Hamas seizes control militarily in Gaza. Katyusha rockets are launched from Lebanon into northern Israel for the first time since the end of last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah war.
Two important inferences can be distilled from this list. One is that the Tehran regime takes its slogan, "death to America," quite seriously, even if we do not. It is arming the Taliban, with which it was at sword’s point when the Taliban were in power. It seems to be supplying explosives not only to Shiite, but also Sunni terrorists in Iraq. It reportedly is sheltering high-level al Qaeda figures despite the Sunni-Shiite divide. All of these surprising actions are for the sake of bleeding the U.S. However hateful this behavior may be to us, it has a certain strategic logic: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
What is even more worrisome about the events enumerated above is that most of them are devoid of any such strategic logic.
Many inside this country may not believe we are at war with Iran, but Iran definitely understands that they are indeed. Many on both sides of the aisle tell us that the only way this thing is going to be solved is through negotiations. Nevermind that this tactic has gotten us nowhere since 1979. Nevermind the fact that the leadership in that country cannot be trusted. Nevermind the fact that Iran cares little what carrots we dangle in front of them, they don’t need any carrots since they just take or do what they want.
But hey, lets throw all this out the window and put that carrot in front of their face while we hope that a nuke doesn’t hit Israel and begin the next World War.
Leaders on both sides of the oceans dangled carrots and prayed in 1937….you see how well that worked out.
See author page
While I am NO FAN AT ALL of Richard Clarke’s, his book, Against All Enemies spends an entire chapter describing how the Clinton Admin almost took America to war with Iran. Fmr FBI Director Louis Freeh spends the first 39 pages of his autobiography detailing his personal experience in the Khobar Towers attack, details how Iran was deeply involved, and expresses his gross dissatisfaction with the Clinton Administration’s effort to cover it up (foreshadowing the USS Cole coverup).
Some people can see Iran behind everything from TWA800 and Oklahoma City to 911 and even in Iraq today. In some cases it’s true. In others it’s not. In the end, Iran has 200lbs of enriched uranium, mountains that prevent the use of conventional mechanized forces, dispersed strategic centers making strategic bombing limited in effect, oh, and tens of thousands of suicide bombers eager to attack the US.
Nothing else matters.
Nothing in the former because of the latter.
We can only hope that they don’t really learn how deliberately divided and surrender-oriented this nation has become.