On Oct 9, 12:27*pm, wrote:
On Fri, 9 Oct 2009 03:36:15 -0700 (PDT)





John B wrote:
On Oct 9, 10:08=A0am, wrote:
"Norman Wells" wrote:
I don't think you can quite tar Dr Jim Squires with that brush. =A0He pr=
obably
knows more about the Lockerbie disaster than anyone else, having lost hi=
s
daughter in it, and having followed every nuance of the matter from day =
one.
He is convinced 100% that Megrahi was innocent, and I for one think he's
hardly likely to be wrong.

With all due respect to the man - having a death in the family doesn't
turn you an expert into what caused the death. He may well have followed
the case in detail but unless he's privvy to confidential intelligence
documents that other members of the press and public are not then he has
no greater insight than anyone else - just opinion.

No, the point is that he's spent years of his life researching the
documents, whereas you, most members of the press, and most members of

I doubt he has a greater insight than the people who wrote the documents
in the first place and I'm pretty sure the judges in the trial did more than
just skim them.

The documents were written by a wide range of different people - and
the whole point of the 'it wasn't Libya' movement is that the judges'
decision in the first trial was based primarily on political pressure
rather than on a straight reading of the evidence[*].

This view is supported by the fact that someone with no reason to push
for any particular outcome other than the truth, who's read all the
evidence, believes the evidence does not support the judges'
conclusions.
[*] this doesn't require any belief that threats, bribes or other
direct interventions were used against the judges: a combination of
some ambition and some understanding of what the US and UK governments
of the time wanted to see would have worked just fine.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org

On Fri, 9 Oct 2009 05:21:07 -0700 (PDT)
John B wrote:
[*] this doesn't require any belief that threats, bribes or other
direct interventions were used against the judges: a combination of
some ambition and some understanding of what the US and UK governments
of the time wanted to see would have worked just fine.

So what in effect you're saying is that the US & UK governments drew up a
list of Libyan intelligence agents and then tossed some coins as to which
one they'd use as a patsy and ask Gaddafi to hand over. Well why stop at
1? Why not ask for 3 and make it look like they got the whole team?
If Gaddifi was so desperate to get back into the US good books he could
have found some guys who'd ****ed him off and served them up on a platter
and the US could have made up what they liked about them, right?

Sorry , it doesn't wash.

B2003