11/03/2014
No one who looks at today's front page of the
Telegraph can avoid recalling the events of 2009. It was then that we saw the
repatriation of the Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Megrahi, followed by a
storm of protest and
faux indignation at his release.
In particular, one recalls a certain
Tim Montgomerie who mounted his high horse, to post the following quote on his site:
It seems to me an utter perversion of the meaning of compassion, both in law and morality, to suggest that an unrepentant, mass murderer of entirely innocent human beings should not be required to end his life in prison.
Yet, even then, it had been known with near certainty for some years that Megrahi had not been responsible for the bombing, or involved in any way. The evidence had long before pointed to Iran as the progenitor, although not at the Syrian quartet currently fingered in the
Telegraph piece.
There are details
here and, shortly before he died, Paul Foot wrote
this in the
Guardian asserting Megrahi's innocence, branding his conviction as the last in the long line of British judges' miscarriages of criminal justice.
In brief, Foot argued that the Lockerbie bombing had been 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 had been the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the
Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects - some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.
This line of inquiry had persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it.
A year later, 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.
Thus, the explanation he offered, Foot wrote, was "a terrible indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and US governments and their intelligence services".
That was on 31 March 2004, almost exactly ten years ago, And it has taken the
Telegraph those ten years to catch up, with many of the great and the good, to say nothing of the lesser mortals, still to lumbering along in its wake.
Once again, therefore, this newspaper goes to illustrate the mindset of the legacy media as a whole. In their own terms, nothing is news until they say it is, and nothing is true until they themselves say so. Facts are irrelevant, and belief is everything.
Ten years, and more, after it has become plainly evident that Iran was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, the
Telegraph is prepared to believe it as well. And because it is this self-important newspaper changing its beliefs, the conversion becomes front page news.
The remarkable thing is that there is anyone left in this world who trusts what it now tells us.
