Posted by Hart G.W. Lidov on March 17, 1998 at 20:46:33:
Three recent publications demonstrate the abysmal failure of the
press and the media in the matter of the Pan Am 103 bombing
at Lockerbie. To get a couple of myths that have distracted a lot of
the reporting out of the way at the beginning
1) All aspects of the Lockerbie deserved attention - This was the largest killing of American civilians by a foreign agents since at least WWII. Selected aspects - the “interview the sobbing relatives” stories and the “hodunit story” have been overdone and repeated without end. By contrast there has not been a single article examining the role of the US government in relation to Lockerbie. Even the "whodunit" stories have almost without exception been the “US State Department version” (which has shifted with the political winds). The only reporting - good or bad, has appeared in fringe press in Europe and the unverifiable mire of the internet. In recent years they can only be found by combing internet databases, and efforts at publication reportedly have met with shadowy legal challenges (Ashton, Mail on Sunday June 9, 1996)
2) The issue of “the Libyan’s” is a distraction. Whoever actually planted the Lockerbie bomb was a “foot-soldier”. According to the US State Department in it's current version it was two men who were members of the Libyan intelligence service. Carrying on about turning them over for trial is hypocritical nonsense or a foolish distraction. Would we turn over similar agents to a foreign government - we gave Capt Will Rogers III of the USS Vincennes, who shot down an Iranian Airbus and killed 290 civilians, a medal of merit (for the period of service, not for the incident, LA times;5/28/89). The indictment in absentia of the Libyans will however, because it is a criminal proceeding and criminal proceedings ordinarily take precedence over civil proceedings (and this one will pend forever) provide a legal excuse for the government to deny access to any information in regard to Lockerbie indefinitely into the future. Contrary to the suggestion of some of the victim's families the criminal suite trumps any civil action against Libya, not visa versa. Meantime it is difficult to imagine that the US or Britain would like to have the men in court, or that Iran would let them appear alive in such a forum considering the potential damage to the gradually thawing relations with that country.
But what are the real questions - that have gone unanswered ?
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT BETWEEN JULY AND DECEMBER 1988?
Oliver Revell was executive assistant director of the FBI and the man responsible for counter-terrorism in 1988. Something that has never been commented on is that he was already involved in defending the Reagan/Bush camp in connection with the Iran-Contra affair in 1986(Nation, 7/18/87). Revell was certainly one of the people in the best position to know the aims of Iranian backed terrorists, and if our government had an interest in stopping them, Revell would have been a key player. When in October 1988 the German police apprehended terrorist who may have actually planned the Lockerbie bombing Revell must have been aware and he subsequently referred to it as the “bumbling of the German police”. In October 1988 the FAA inspected the security facilities of Pan Am in Frankfurt(NYT 9/17/89). Our government had the best available account of what security there could or could not be expected to deal with - in the same month that Revell was looking at photographs of the barometrically triggered bomb taken from PFLP-GC terrorists in Frankfurt. In that light it is interesting that much of what has ever been reported in the US media about US Government activities in relation to Pan Am 103 and Lockerbie came from Revell. In 1995 Revell appears to have acknowledged in print that his own son was scheduled to travel home on leave for Christmas on Pan Am 103 and unexpectedly had his trip moved back by two weeks, saving him from the ill-fated flight (Living Marxism issue 81, July/August 1995 - yup that is how far out the press has to be to do anything but tote the State Department line on Pan Am 103!). The US government had received the famous Helsinki warning on December 5, two days before young Revell's leave was moved up. This is the same warning which was disseminated to US embassies across Europe and then declared a hoax after FBI agents, Revell's subordinates, paid a visit to Helsinki (Washington Post, 1/6/89). In nine years no journalist in the US has gotten into print examining the Pan Am 103 investigation without using Revell as a source, and not surprisingly these connections have never been commented on.
What did the Counter Terrorist Center, established in 1986, as "a model
of interagency cooperation" according to John Deutch (Foreign Policy, Fall,1997),do
with the German warnings,the Helsinki warnings, the radio-intercepts from
Beirut(NYT 5/23/89), and the knowledge that Iran had a grievous score to
settle after the U.S.S.Vincennes incident - apparently nothing. When ask,
Deutch - a university provost, author of several hundred scholarly papers
- could manage “interesting”. In nine years nothing has come to light to
suggest that the US government had any interest in stopping the attack
on the Pan Am airliner or doing anything but re-establishing relations
with Iran, at the lowest possible cost to State Department employees. However
the deed was done, a detail which is truly irrelevant, in the absence of
any evidence to the contrary one must assume that the US intelligence services
elected to “turn a blind eye”. That, not the carrying on about Palestinian,
Syrian or Libyan “foot-soldiers” is the real issue and the real disgrace.
Wright and Bakhash (Foreign Policy, Fall,1997) along with editorials
in the WSJ make clear why Iran has too big a market and has too many petrodollars
to isolate or ignore and that was true in 1988. Even then Iran was too
important to hold accountable and Texan oilman George Bush switched blame
to Syria as part of his inauguration and later, in the interests of the
Gulf War, to that most convenient scapegoat Libya, were it rests today.
In fact it was a clever strategy - Libya will never turn over the agents
- the Iranians, British and Americans would be lining up to make sure that
they never appeared in court - which would risk upsetting the mutually
beneficial and improving relations between Iran and the US, and so long
as there is a pending criminal case, the US can deny anyone access to any
information ...indefinitely.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE PRESS ?
The American press - particularly the major papers have made every effort to expunge Pan Am 103, not to mention the connection with Iran, altogether. It is politically expedient self-censorship. A high-level Iranian defector in Germany in 1997 implicated the Iranian government in initiating the Pan Am bombing and it was reported in the German press and secondarily in the English Guardian (7/14/97), but has never been mentioned at all in American papers. No one has followed up interviews with State Department personal from 1988 - how did they get home for Christmas ...were all the planes half empty and selling half price tickets - or just Pan Am 103? Does no one wonder about a connection between Bush, Iran, Oliver Revell, and an unpaid debt after the Vincennes incident?
What happened to the Prime Time interview(11/30/89)of US Moscow Embassy Consular Assistant Karen Decker - never followed up. ABC won’t even acknowlege requests for transcripts of that interview.
Who has paid for the libel suits against the “Trail of the Octopus”
in England and why was Publishers Group West put off their plans to bring
out an American edition - a call from the
DoJ or the same lawyers at work in England perhaps?
Lester Coleman and the “Trail of the Octopus” may be all lot of hocum
but why did the DoJ pursue him long after the Pan Am trial was over (and
Coleman obviously had no money for a legal defense) hold his feet to the
fire until he plead guilty to perjury and
then let him go with “time served”. That’s how the Spanish
Inquisition arrived at the “truth” ... but was all that effort just
a warning to journalists and editors?
Just how awful can the journalism be -
As bad is the book “The Media and Disasters:Pan Am 103” by Joan Deppa
- a professor of journalism! There are only two types of story about Pan
Am 103 in the US. Deppa herself recognizes, in the introduction, that “this
particular disaster was international in the ultimate sense of the word:
it seemed from the outset to be aimed at an American airliner, probably
in retribution for some action by the US government” but the book that
follows ignores the whole question of the US government response, was it
adequate, was the investigation by the US press adequate, how and why in
this essentially American disaster the US press mustered nothing more than
“sob stories” and mouthing the information handed to them by Reagan/Bush
spokesmen like Oliver Revell. How is it that any attempts to produce stories
other than the “State Department version”, especially in the US, have been
stifled or quietly withdrawn. The watchdog - which is the most important
role of the media functioning at its best - was muzzled from the start;
how did it happen? That is the real media issue - the one that is particular
to Pan Am 103. Deppa systematically devotes separate sections to every
conceivable reaction, families, police, journalists, but the government,
which she acknowledges is at the heart of the issue, gets a few dishwater
pages late in the book that say nothing incisive or new. This is passed
off as analysis.
The Pan Am bombing was not an accident - so it rarely appears as a
"airline accident", and when it terrorist attacks on the US are tabulated
it is generally avoided as “foreign”. Andrew Revkin (NYT 12/14/97) could
not even get the the year right. It was not a natural occurrence - like
the Grand Forks flood, the Northridge earthquake, or even some airline
disasters, but Joan Deppa’s treatment, which evades issues by using the
Pan Am bombing as thought it were a just another natural disaster, one
pretty much like another, is certainly taking the easy way out. She and
journalists like her are an insult the very people who are fodder for their
interviews and those who died at Lockerbie.
Pan Am 103 was an American disaster - an American plane and largely
American dead. The circumstances and number of American civilians killed
is almost without precedent. And to see critical issues being evaded and
turned into the mush of politic rhetoric is a disgrace.
The nearest thing to an explanation of why there has never been an
exploration of the US intelligence agencies in relation to Lockerbie may
be, by implication, a lecture by William M. Baker, the CIA's chief spokesman
during the investigation of the Lockerbie bombing (NYT 2/25/89) given at
Harvard University, July 27, 1989, on "Restraining the Media at the CIA"
with specific examples of stories killed at the Wall Street Journal, New
York Times and Washington Post. Or perhaps the example of Lester Coleman,
Gary Webb and perhaps Danny Casolaro has put the muzzle on any journalist
or editor? After almost 10 years is Steve Emerson (3/18/90) and John Newhouse
(New Yorker 7/10/89)taking dog biscuits from Oliver Revell really the best
that American journalism can manage?