Mandela’s Insight: Lockerbie Papers and Blair’s Libya Lie
Confidential documents which became released in the UK might be the reason why the Americans recently kidnapped a third Libyan suspect who they have framed for the Lockerbie bombing.
On December 29th, it was revealed that documents held in the national archive showed that Nelson Mandela actually told the UK it was wrong to hold Libya responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, according to reports.
They reveal discussions between former British prime minister Tony Blair and his cabinet and Mr Mandela, who was acting as an intermediary for Libya, after the Lockerbie bombing with the South African icon firmly believing that Libya had no hand in the Lockerbie bombing.
A meeting between Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela followed the controversial conviction in 2001 of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi for the bombing after he stood trial at a specially convened Scottish court at a US military airbase in the Netherlands.
Mr Mandela and members of the Saudi royal family had previously helped to negotiate Al Megrahi’s extradition from Libya to stand trial.
Earlier the UN issued Security Council Resolution (SCR) economic sanctions on Libya, including the banning of weapons sales, until it accepted responsibility.
In the meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Mandela on April 30, 2001, Mr Mandela opposed the UN stance.
“Mandela argued it was wrong to hold Libya legally responsible for the bombing,” the cables revealed.
“He had studied the judgment from the trial and was critical of the account the judges had taken of the views of the Libyan defector, even though they had described him as an unreliable witness.
“He had discussed it with Kofi Annan [former secretary general of the United Nations] as he felt the Security Council resolution requiring that [Libya’s president Muammar] Qaddafi accept responsibility were at odds with the legal position.
“The prime minister probed Mandela’s approach. We were not insisting that Qaddafi had ordered the Lockerbie bombing. The Libyan state may not be directly responsible but they were still responsible for Megrahi’s actions.”
Mr Mandela was again reminded during the meeting that Al Megrahi had been a member of the Libyan Intelligence Service when he carried out the bombing.
“Our starting point was the SCRs and we were keen to see these implemented. We wanted to open a channel to the Libyans to work out how to do this, but it had proved difficult after Qaddafi had rejected the trial verdict,” documents show.
“The prime minister said that if Megrahi lost his appeal then presumably Libya would have to come to some arrangement on paying compensation. He thought it would be sensible for Qaddafi to talk to us about this. Mandela did not dispute those points, but it was essential that Qaddafi’s decision to pay compensation should be seen as voluntary and not because he was legally bound to do so.
“While Qaddafi was a very difficult man, he, Mandela, trusted him to fulfil the commitments he made. But if we now insisted he was accountable in law for Lockerbie he would challenge that, and Mandela said he would back him up.”
In May 2003 that Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and had previously agreed to set up a $2.7 billion fund to compensate families of those killed in the explosion, although few experts even believe that Gaddafi accepted culpability but was trying to find a diplomatic solution.
Al Megrahi being found guilty and the compensation package was a way out for the Libyan leader.
The Libyan intelligence agent was framed and was the only man convicted over the attack. He was sentenced to life until his release on compassionate grounds in 2009 after a cancer diagnosis. He died in Libya in 2012.
The efforts by Margaret Thatcher, John Major and finally Tony Blair to support the Libyan angle are highly suspicious though as a number of experts believe that the UK governments were simply doing their best to support the US in a cover up.
If American families knew the truth about the Lockerbie bombing – that the Pan Am flight was carrying drugs and money under the supervision of CIA officers on board as part of a whacky scheme of Ronald Reagen to cooperate with terrorists in Beirut – then the legal cases would be unprecedented in US history.
Because of this gargantuan cover up, America, still to this day needs to keep the Libyan ‘story’ alive.
Consequently, a Libyan man, Abu Agila Masud, was recently accused of making the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am flight and was taken into US custody through an illegal rendition helped by rogue militias in Libya believed to have been paid by the US. Some sceptical analysts might conclude that the date of the released documents was known by the US, hence the timing of the kidnapping of Masud.
The terrorist attack on board the Boeing 747 bound for New York from London on December, 21, 1988, killed all 259 passengers and crew and a further 11 people in Lockerbie when wreckage destroyed their homes. It was the deadliest terrorist incident to have occurred on British soil.
