Remembering Paul Foot and 'Lockerbie's dirty secret'

While Britain, America, France and other mighty nations play space invader games over the Libyan Desert, nudge-winkingly plotting the overthrow of the unloved Gaddafi, my mind keeps turning back to Private Eye's late and celebrated investigative reporter Paul Foot and his well-argued alternative view of the Lockerbie atrocity.

In 2004 he wrote in The Guardian: 'The Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship.'

This was the British government's view until 1989 when Mrs Thatcher received a call from President Bush (Snr). Foot continues:  'In 1989 British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the "evidence" of a Libyan "defector", handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges.

'In Britain, meanwhile, Thatcher, John Major and Blair obstinately turned down the bereaved families' requests for a full public inquiry into the worst mass murder in British history.

'It follows from this explanation that Megrahi is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing and his conviction is the last in the long line of British judges' miscarriages of criminal justice.'

Now, this may all be lunatic nonsense for all I know. Or may be not. Whatever the truth, I'm more inclined to reconsider Foot's work and conclusions than to listen to the appalling and mindless propaganda currently churned out by the mainstream media in its glamorous and euphemistic coverage of the bombardment of Libya.

To read Foot's Guardian piece, click here.