The latest round of the Lockerbie bombing affair confirms that might is always right in international law. Kate Margam reports
After months of controversy, in May Channel 4 finally screened The Maltese Double Cross, a film investigating the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 which killed 270 people. In the studio debate that followed, Sir Teddy Taylor MP made explicit the view shared by many: that the US and British authorities had set up Libya as their main Lockerbie suspect in 1990, because they did not want to embarrass the more likely suspects, Iran and Syria, at a time when those states were backing America in the Gulf War.
It begins to look like we are entering the political twilight zone when a right-wing Tory MP openly accuses his own government and the USA of conspiring to cover up the truth, of making false accusations and subsequently imposing sanctions against Libya on false pretences. But Taylor is not alone. Labour MP Tam Dalyell, Dr Jim Swire of UK Families Flight 103 (whose daughter Flora died in the bombing) and various other individuals have been making these accusations for some time. Yet all that has happened during that time is that the USA has sought to extend the sanctions against Libya, and the FBI has offered a $4m reward for the capture of two named Libyan suspects.
The Maltese Double Cross seeks to substantiate claims that the facts surrounding Lockerbie have been covered up and Libya has been framed. The film itself has recently become almost as controversial as the incident it investigates. Last year it was withdrawn from the London Film Festival and investigated by the FBI. The film's makers and those who have shown it privately, such as the Angle Gallery in Birmingham, report being threatened and intimidated by unknown sources (see 'Unanswered questions over Lockerbie', Living Marxism, January 1995). After Channel 4 agreed to show The Maltese Double Cross in May, a new media campaign was launched against it.
Before the screening, David Leppard wrote a hatchet job in the Sunday Times - 'FBI exposes documentary on Lockerbie as a sham' (7 May 1995). The article focused on two accusations made against the film. First, since there was Libyan money involvedddd in making the film, it cannot be an objective account; second, key witnesses in the film cannot be trusted since they are 'known fabricators' and some are criminals indicted by the US government on charges of fraud and drug-dealing.
In other words, never mind the facts in the film, one whiff of Gadaffi's gold and it must be a pack of lies. The campaign to discredit The Maltese Double Cross is based on the assumption that Libyans and their allies are all paid-up liars, while Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times and the FBI are independent beacons of truth. In the same way, if the US government says that the film's witnesses should be ignored because they are frauds and drug-pushers, that is good enough for Leppard. The fact that they were only indicted in the USA after they blew the whistle on a drug-running operation run by the CIA, an operation which the film claims facilitated the bombing, is apparently irrelevant.
It has been easy for America and Britain to blacken the film's name by exploiting the propaganda capital which they have built up during years of branding Libya a country of terrorists and Colonel Gadaffi himself a madman. Defenders of The Maltese Double Cross point out that even if all David Leppard's assertions are true, the film asks questions and provides clues to the truth which make it a worthy investigation that we can judge for ourselves.
The Lockerbie cover up is a clear example of how honesty and justice have no place on the agenda of international politics. There are no rules in international jurisdiction except the ones that powerful countries like the USA make up as they go along.
With regard to Lockerbie, UN Resolution 731 of 1992 set a legal precedent. America and Britain demanded that Libya hand over two accused men for trial. Given that no extradition treaty exists, this demand has no legal basis. Under the Montreal Convention of 1971 suspects should be tried in the country to whose laws they are subject - Libya. Despite that, the UN Security Council has demanded that the two be handed over and has threatened further punishment against Libya for not obeying its orders.
It seems that the USA and other Western powers can have their cake and eat it. They can enforce resolutions that have no legal precedent; yet Libya's offer to hand the men over to the International Court of Justice was dismissed because it has no precedent. International law is really the law of the jungle, under which might is always right and the angels are assumed to be on the side of the big battalions. That is why any trial of the two Libyans anywhere in the world would be a parody of justice.
In June, the press reported that a frustrated President Bill Clinton had effectively abandoned efforts to get the two accused Libyans extradited to stand trial in the USA. This story was presented as a 'victory for the terrorists'. In fact the USA and Britain have already achieved their propaganda aims in the Lockerbie affair; to cast a third world state like Libya in the role of international criminal, and establish the West's moral credentials as world judge and jury. Whether or not anybody actually stands in the dock is neither here nor there.
The campaign to cut through the dirty dealing that surrounds the Lockerbie affair and reveal the truth has been championed by a few individuals. They have been pilloried as eccentric trouble-makers, and the strain is telling. In Channel 4's discussion after the screening of The Maltese Double Cross, Jim Swire faced Oliver 'Buck' Revell, leader of the FBI investigation, and asked how it was that Revell's own son had so luckily escaped flying on flight 103, when he had been booked on it. The film claims that key personnel knew there was a bomb on the flight and cancelled their bookings. Flora Swire was not one of those key people, so she boarded the plane and died.
Jim Swire is an ordinary bereaved father backed only by six and a half years of campaigning for the truth. Oliver Revell has the full weight of the US state behind him. According to the international law of the jungle, that means Revell is always in the right. His alibi for his son's escape was that he had been given leave two weeks earlier than planned, and so missed the fateful flight. Everybody agreed it was a fortunate coincidence.
Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 81, July/August 1995